Crazy Cronies

You can't call this 1895 wool embroidered quilt crazy.

 

Or this one dated a year later.

 

Dated 1860 from the Rhode Island Project & the Quilt Index

 

A 20th-century example: 1931

 

This composition of hundreds of embroidered floral squares was shown years ago at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Washington. Perhaps a bit OCD but not Crazy....

 

Ruby? 1905 

Collection of the New England Quilt Museum 

Attributed to Emily L. Wiley Munroe (1823-1894)

Lynnfield, Massachusetts

Estimated Date: 1860s

Essay by Lynne Zacek Bassett: https://massquilts.org/Docs/Munroe_Essay.pdf

1910, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania Project & The Quilt Index

 

 

Jeanne Poore's Family

The style tends to be wool suiting squares or rectangles, often embroidered with hand-drawn florals and other images, rather than commercial patterns.

Donna Vitale's Inventory

 Some vignettes were drawn more skillfully than others.

 

1899. Florals may look familiar.

 

1896 

The same images one sees in truly crazy quilts.

 

Embroidered wool rectangle

Perhaps copied from published designs meant for crazy quilts and clothing trim.

 

On a silk crazy quilt

Butterick Needlecraft Pattern

 

Donna Vitale comes across these in her collecting trips.

None of the examples here is quilted, which would be problematic with the heavy suiting wools used for the squares and rectangles.

 

Volckening Collection, New England

The style is probably related to the craze for "postcard" quilts, swatches of suiting fabric cut the size of a penny postcard.

Tailors' swatch books must have been in high demand.

Above: Ella wants to trade rectangles with other

readers of the Civil War Veterans' paper The National Tribune

Rather than a postcard she suggests using an envelope.

 If those popular postcard sized rectangles are decorated the embroidery is usually a name.

 

But this is a different style.