Fancy Machine Grounds

Every early 19th-century reproduction line needs a print with a fancy machine ground.

For my Lately Arrived From London collection for Moda I had a rather large piece of fabric with a floral trail figure atop a detailed "fancy machine ground." The document print above is the larger piece, the reproduction is the smaller square. It may date to about 1820-1840.

In the englargement you can see the finely detailed dots behind the florals. They not only add a background, they form part of the floral figures. These backgrounds were not engraved on the roller by hand; they were applied in a machining process.

Above:  the tan reproduction in the top left and the larger brown document print for the Meryfield print from my Hartfield collection, an early-19th-century line I did a few years ago. The green leaves in the original were probably done with a wood block, the brown ground printed with a roller. Notice the streak in the fancy machine ground, indicating it crimped in the roller.

Once printers figured out how to apply detailed machining to copper rollers the designers came up with many outrageous combinations as in the print from an old quilt above. The insect-like figure and the striped machined ground have very little in common. And then there are those green sticks.... People loved the variety and the layers of detail.

Designers and customers welcomed the new look about 1810 because older wood-block printing limited the types of backgrounds. One typical wood block ground was a solid color hand applied around the figures with a wood block, as in the chintz above. The technology wasn't perfect and printers often left haloes of white between the figure and ground---the registration was off.

For more detail the block printer could add a patterned ground behind the figure, in this case a regularly spaced dot, probably applied with a wood block fitted with pins in a regular pattern. In England these dotted grounds were called Stormont grounds, in France picotage.

But the fancy machine grounds were ---well much fancier---than the old Stormont grounds. Once the roller printed grounds were possible the designers and the printers showed their skills in many combinations of figure and ground. The detail is impressive, the registration is perfect---the only flaw (if one were being picky) is that the design combinations were sometimes strange.

So if you are looking for an authentic 1810-1840 look buy prints with detailed grounds---fancy machine grounds. You wouldn't see them any earlier than 1800 because the technology wasn't there yet. And they fell out of favor about 1840 as new styles developed.

Above is the Little Molly print in the muslin colorway that shows the fancy machine ground off the best.

In the tea colorway the shading dominates the florals, creating a rainbow look.

In the plum colorway the ground is more subtle and the figure stands out.

Excentrics in Nebraska

Elegant Geometry Curated by Bridget Long

You absolutely must see the exhibit at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska---if you like old fabric. I'm lucky enough that I can drive there in four hours so I plan to go back before it comes down in early January.

Hexagon mosaic, maker unknown

Probably made in United Kingdom, 1810-1830

108" x 106" IQSC 2006.056.0002

Gift of Clyde E. and Joan B. Shorey

On this trip my favorite thing was the quilt above. You can enjoy it at a distance as an interesting composition.

But it's the closeup view that makes it's spectacular. The maker sorted her fabrics carefully, creating areas of dark prints framing areas of light. She had an exceptionally diverse scrapbag, but diverse in a narrow category of prints---monochrome prints in blue, pink and brown.

These finely detailed florals and geometrics 

are calicoes printed with the latest roller printing technology---

up to date  in 1820.

The top was full of  excentric prints.

A proud printer testifying to the British Parliament in 1840 described these prints as "a particular style of design known by the name of 'excentrics,' in the production of which England surpasses every other nation in the world." Excentric prints (eccentric in American spelling) are fine geometric figures with jagged or wavy distortions.

Detail of the classic eccentric Lane's Net

from an American quilt about 1870

 Lane's Net is a specific eccentric print style with many variations.

 This top has more variations of Lane's Net than any I've seen.

The calico printer in 1840 described the invention of excentrics as an accident that occurred when a parallel stripe creased in the roller, "producing a new and unexpected effect. " Rather than discarding the misprint, he said, the enterprising mill owner (Mr. Lane?) was inspired to create a new fad for jagged stripes.

(Click on this photo and it will enlarge)

This version of accidental invention tends to be the origin story today (I've published it in my books). But the more I learn the more I doubt the tale. Eccentric prints were probably based less on accident and more on technological advances in lathes and other metal tools.

Drawing using excentric line

 The word excentric means odd or erratic (off-center) but it also refers to geometric ellipses and circles with centers at different points (as opposed to concentric circles.)

Bank note engraving making use of excentric curved lines

 

Toolmakers developed metal lathes with so-called excentric chucks that could create mechanical drawings of endless intricate line pattern, first used to engrave unforgeable bank note backgrounds. The English calico printers co-opted the technology as well as the name "excentric." 

Three eccentric prints making use of curves and straight lines

The name eccentric came to mean any geometric print with intricate line pattern.

Late-19th-century scraps of Lane's Net, named for the mill owner

 

Look for variations on Lane's Net throughout the 19th century. It makes a great print collection focus. As far as the earliest date: The calico printer said in 1840 that the design originated 30 years ago, so 1810 is a good starting point. I've seen Lane's Net into the 20th century and variations have been reproduced in the last 20 years.

Here's another excuse to visit Lincoln. There will be a lecture at IQSC on Tuesday October 25 at noon.

“The Art and Science of Patchwork Tessellations”,
Dr. Barbara Caron, IQSCM Assistant Director.

See more about the exhibit here:

http://www.quiltstudy.org/exhibitions/online_exhibitions/mosaic/mosaic1.html

And buy the catalog online here (It's sold only through the museum.)

http://webstore.quiltropolis.net/stores_app/Browse_Item_Details.asp?Shopper_id=52401031123565240&Store_id=766&page_id=23&Item_ID=1229

The catalog is great, full of wonderful details, but if you want to see all the closeups you have to see the show. Photography without flash is permitted.

Read an 1841 essay on copyright in design that mentions Lane's Net by clicking here

http://books.google.com/books?id=w2VRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=%22lane's+net%22+calico&source=bl&ots=V4shSvXdXT&sig=4b8aqPmCMIJSKiht3OJHdLnuMjE&hl=en&ei=kMyJTrSQJsHGgAey-fX5Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22lane's%20net%22%20calico&f=false

Misdated Quilts

Dated quilts are helpful in training the Quilt Detective's eye.

But once in a while the date is wrong. This quilt, found in an online auction, is NOT from 1876.

The color scheme and the individual cottons offer good clues to the actual date when it was made---about 1890-1920.

Two of the easiest clues for a novice detective to learn are that the wine-colored red prints and the black-on- white prints above were a fad from about 1890-1920.  The red, which the dyers called cerise (French for cherry) and the marketers called claret, was quite popular around the turn of the last century. Characteristics are simple white figures on a wine-colored background.

The black and white prints (a true black) like the one above were not possible until about 1890 and were very fashionable in the first decades of the 20th century. This quilt, also recently in an online auction, is most likely 1890-1920. 

The pattern---Jacob's Ladder or Underground Railroad---was also very popular in the 1890-1920 decades.

Some of the fabrics, like a white dot on indigo, are no help in dating---too popular for too long. But the blacks and the wine-reds are excellent clues.

The black-and-white prints often read as gray. They were sometimes called mourning prints 100 years ago.

Someone (I'd guess the same someone) added the dates much later, probably using family history as the basis for her guess rather than any knowledge of when cotton prints were available. Another clue---black embroidery thread not used in the 1870s.

A very weak clue to date is the stitch used in both quilts. It's the way I embroider---what is that stitch??? A directionally-challenged chain stitch???

A better chain stitch that was probably actually embroidered in 1879

That crabbed stitch in black thread seems very "late-20th-century", but don't rely on that stitch as a basis for dating a quilt. Fabrics are your best clues. And the fabrics in the misdated quilts are 20 years later than the dates.

Pillar Prints

A mockup of the pillar print in my Lately Arrived From London repro collection. 

Every early 19th-century reproduction collection needs a pillar print.

Pillar prints were popular in the early 19th century when new dye ideas

 enabled printers to put bright color next to bright color.

The designs echo the classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome with stripes assuming the form of fluted columns interrupted by ornate capitals and garlands of flowers.

A tea-ground chintz print from about 1815.

 The reds here were probably printed by copper cylinder,

 the blue, yellow and overprinted green added by blocks or hand.

Other names for the style are “architectural prints” or "columnar prints."

Monochrome patriotic print.

One indication of a roller or cylinder printed fabric is the short repeat.

 Roller-printed design repeat about every 15 inches.

If this were printed with a larger copper plate

the repeat would be over twice as wide.

The term "pillar print" seems to be rather recent, a mid-twentieth-century name. The earliest reference I have found by searching Google's digitized books is in a 1956 British publication. The term is more commonly used to describe Japanese wood blocks on paper, in which a pillar print (hashira-ye) is a long, narrow print meant to hang from a wooden pillar in a house.

Detail of a whole cloth quilt.

Stripes inside a stripe.

Pillar prints were popular for decorating before 1830 or so.

Florence Montgomery noted an English printer's mention of a chintz with pillars and garlands in a 1760-62 notebook, which may be the earliest reference to the design idea in a print, but surviving examples printed with woodblocks date only to the end of the 18th century. The pillar prints we come across in American quilts tend to be from about 1800-1830 and usually printed by a roller.

Stripes pieced into strips. Two different prints in a strip quilt.

The same pillar print as above but a different colorway.

And another colorway.

 English museum curator Peter Floud wrote a series of articles for The Magazine Antiques on "English Printed Textiles" in 1957. He examined four English printers' pattern books in the collection of London's  Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musee de l'Impression of the Societe Industrielle at Mulhouse, France. Floud's conclusions remain the standard scholarship fifty years later.

"The pattern books show that [pillar prints] enjoyed two quite separate spells of popularity; the first between 1800 and 1808, when a very large number of polychrome block-printed pillar prints were turned out by all the leading English printers; the second between 1825 and 1830, when it was revived as a vehicle for some of the finest roller-printed designs ever produced. It appears in both cases to have remained a purely English phenomenon, without any parallel among French printed fabrics."

Architectural prints were popular with American quilters

 between those two periods of production.

At top of this photo the document print for the pillar print

 in the Lately Arrived from London reproduction collection.

At bottom a tea-ground and a white-ground colorway.

A utilitarian four-patch with a

 pillar print in the border along the top.

For the quilt detective looking to date a quilt rather than a piece of fabric the best estimate might be range of 1800-1860. The fabric may have been unfashionable for interior decoration in the 1840s but quilters continued to salvage patches from their old drapes for decades.

One does not often come across pillar prints in borders and strips,

 but look for them as scraps.

Quilt from the Spencer Museum of Art, about 1830.

Several years ago Terry Thompson and I

reproduced this print for a Moda reproduction collection.

Above is the document.

Here's the reproduction with a chocolate ground.

Buy 5 or 6 yards when you find these pillar prints as they make terrific borders for quilts copying an early 19th-century look. [I always tell you to buy 5 yards, but better to be safe than sorry.]

Kathy Ronsheimer didn't buy ENUFF,

so she had to cut the pillar in two for a border for her

 version of Jeana Kimball's Old Voices New Impressions sampler

But it all worked out nicely, don't you think?

Click on the link to see Florence McConnell's reproduction quilt using a pillar print
http://www.americanquiltstudygroup.org/qs_star_study05.asp