Prussian Blue

Detail of a cotton print that can be classified as a printed plaid, a stripe and a rainbow print. Estimated date: 1840-1860

Over the past few years I've been saving photos of Prussian blue prints like the one above from online auctions. I'm especially interested in quilts with dates inscribed on them. I have quite a few details of Prussian blue prints in quilts inscribed from 1846 to 1868. See below for photos in order of date.

Prussian blue is a dye process. It's also a bright royal blue color produced by that dye, often combined with a buff or tan. The blues are printed in various styles including brilliant rainbow or fondu prints, double blues, plaids and stripes.

Looking at these 9 examples (I didn't see any earlier or later) I can conclude that distinctive rainbow prints, large scale plaids and stripes in Prussian blue were quite the fashion from the mid 1840s to the 1860s, as were the blue and buff combination prints.

When I make these lists of dated quilts I usually throw out the earliest and the latest examples. The earliest example may have been misdated later by someone other than the maker and the lastest example may have been old fabric or blocks put together later. The list is then 7 quilts from 1846 to 1858, twelve years of a fad. The information helps in dating quilts with these fabrics, which to be safe I would say tend to date from 1840 to 1860.

I corroborated these dates by looking in the catalogs of Baltimore album quilts, which include a lot of Prussian blue rainbow prints. I didn't find any Baltimore albums with the graduated blue prints outside this date range.

Note the dates are below each photo.

1846

1846

1848


1848

1850


1853


1855

1858
1868

Buff and Blue Number 2

Julie from Tennessee sent photos of a quilt signed "E. Prouty" that she bought in upstate New York several years ago. She was confused by information in my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns where I indexed the design as "California Rose," indicating it was published about 1898 in the Ladies Art Company's catalog of quilt patterns. The fabrics looked much older than 1898 to her.

Her question is a good one and illustrates the problems with indexing patterns because the names were only published after 1885 or so, 100 years after Americans started making patchwork quilts. Quilts in some designs were made directly from those turn-of-the-last-century patterns and publications, but quilts in other designs were made much earlier than their first published reference.

Julie's quilt is one of those older patterns passed around hand-to-hand before magazines and catalogs began to sell how-to patterns. The fabrics are the blue-and-buff prints in rainbow or fondu (shaded) style that were so fashionable in the 1840s and '50s for clothing and patchwork.

Although it's hard to date quilts from photographs, this high-style color palette was popular in the mid-19th century rather than at the end. She's right in thinking it's older than 1898. As far as a name: My Encyclopedia and BlockBase, its digitized version, show many rather romantic names and variations. Some are pieced and then appliqued to a square, which looks to be the case with Julie's quilt. Others are completely pieced as in the block on the right below.

There is no "correct" name for quilt patterns because names were so often set in print decades after the quilts were made. We have no idea what E. Prouty called her quilt, and Julie can call it what she likes.

The fabrics are a showcase of 1840-60 prints with quite a few rainbow prints and many bright Prussian blue plaids, stripes and eccentric prints. Do note the brown stains next to some of the blue and buff prints. I have seen this kind of brown color echoing blue patches before. It may be a form of dye migration.

If you'd like to read more about Buff and Blue prints see my posting for August 8, 2009 by clicking here:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/08/buff-and-blue.html

I will be eMailing a subscription newsletter The Quilt Detective: Prints Color & Dyes this winter. You can read the first issue, which has to do with Prussian blues, as a free sample, by clicking here:

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/1%20Prussian%20Blue.pdf

For subscription information click here:

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/Newsletter%20Flier.pdf

If you'd like to make a block in the Victoria's/Caesar's Crown, Strawberry design you can print templates any size in my BlockBase computer program for PCs. The many variations are numbered from 3625 to 3665. For more information on BlockBase from Electric Quilt click here:

http://www.electricquilt.com/Shop/BlockBase/BlockBase.asp

Washington Lily

The view from the hotel in San Jose

I attended the American Quilt Study Group's annual seminar in San Jose last week, a real treat for quilt historians. It's so much fun to talk to old friends who have the same interests. Most of us have terrific visual memories. We never forget a quilt pattern (although we occasionally forget each other's names). Among the best is Kathy Sullivan from North Carolina, who was quick to identify the inspiration for the "Star Flower" design in the center of our new Juniper and Mistletoe sampler book. She'd seen a photo of a quilt made in a similar pattern, which she'd thought was so quirky that it must have been an original design.

"Festival of Trees" by Karla Menaugh from Juniper & Mistletoe, "Star Flower" in the center

Applique floral from about 1925

I'd seen another quilt in the design, one in the collection of the International Quilt Festival Collection in Houston. Both are related to a pattern published in Comfort magazine in April, 1923.

Tree of Life Variation (Washington Lily) from the International Quilt Festival Collection

Several years ago I did a newsletter about 20th-century quilt pattern sources and below is a photocopy of a page featuring the original clipping on the lower left, an applique design sent to the magazine by Matilda Miller of Olympia, Washington. It was published as Washington Lily Quilt Design, named for her home state. The magazine advised a color scheme of a dark blue vase, green stems and leaves, pink for the lilies and yellow centers.

I took out the vase and changed the "Washington Lily" design a little to make it more like a tree for our "forest of applique".

I would imagine the old quilt with the shrimp-colored sashing once had red sashing and flowers. The blue vase, so similar to the magazine pattern, makes me think the quilt below was inspired by the magazine and made after 1923 when dyes were very unreliable. The unknown maker exercised her creativity in alternating buds with flowers.

Of course--- this quilt might have been the inspiration for the Comfort pattern. Which came first? Chicken or egg? Quilt or quilt pattern?

This year I am doing another subscription eMail newsletter. The topic will be Prints, Color & Dyes, with discussions about color such as why and when the reds fade to shrimp pink and the greens to khaki as above. It starts November 8th. Click here for more information about the Quilt Detective for 2009-2010:

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/Newsletter%20Flier.pdf

And for more about Karla Menaugh's and my sampler book, Juniper & Mistletoe: A Forest of Applique, click here:

https://www.pickledishstore.com/productDetail.php?PID=1143