Green Calico Reproductions

Mid 19th-century applique block

The difficulties in dyeing and printing cottons green created a rather limited print style that became a classic with 19th-century American quilters.

Possibly 1870-1890

Small-scale green prints were not generally used for clothing or for interior decorating. Quilt historians believe they were printed and marketed to quilters---who loved them for applique and piecing.

When looking for reproductions consider
1) Color
2) Color combinations in the print
3) Print scale
4) Print content

Block dated 1858

1) Color. You have to decide what shade of green you are looking for. Are you trying to match the green as it came off the bolt? A clear color, rather a grass green?

1870s-two similar prints shifting in different fashion.

Or are you copying a faded quilt? Do you want a yellow-green or a teal?

Probably 1880-1910

Or perhaps a brownish green to copy the end-of-the-century greens that faded to a dun color of gray or tan.

2) Color Combinations. You are limited here if you are trying to get the classic period look. You want three colors: green, yellow and black. You might also have a blue figure in there for a mid-century green.

Original print

Reproduction:

A Nancy Gere design she calls Poison Green in her Colonies collection

This stripe from a mid-19th-century block has black figures with no yellow.

Blue figures are sometimes seen with the yellow and black figures,

 as in this mid-19th-century block.

Reproduction:

Five good greens from Jo Morton's Crimson & Clover

3) Print Scale. Look for small-scale calicoes, rather tiny figures without a lot of detail.

A block dated 1869

Reproduction:

A suggestion of a fleur-de-lis from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum collection

4) Print Content: Look for geometrics (for example: stars and dots), florettes (general flower and leaf shapes) and stripes.

A geometric from about 1910.

These prints from about 1900 show very little detail in the figures.

The flowers are mere suggestions of a floral, what fabric designers call ditsies.

Reproduction

A perfect ditsy from Judi Rothermel's Lancaster County collection

Now you know what to look for. I can't tell you where to buy them as some of them are way out of print (and they ARE my competitors) but I will tell you to buy at least a yard when you see good green repros. You can't have too many green calicoes if you make reproduction quilts.

Madder Style Prints

Star quilt with madder-style setting blocks and border

 1840-1860

In the quilt above, the quilter combined indigos, Prussian blues and other fashionable fabrics with madder-style prints in the blocks. Madder browns have an unfortunate tendency to deteriorate or "tender" fabrics. The darkest brown in the quilt above, mordanted with iron, has oxidized, leaving large holes where the dark stripes were. The batting is showing through.

A detail of the star quilt.

 It's an interesting quilt because of all the mismatched strips added to the triangles to make them fit. And doesn't that madder-style print at right look like tiny rotary cutters???

Madder-style prints were popular for clothing and quilts---

the fabric of everyday mid-19th-century life.

These young women photographed with their books

in the 1860s are wearing prints that might have been dyed with madder.

Cottons dyed with madder are among the most common fabrics in nineteenth-century quilts. Madder pleased both mills and customers because it was colorfast and inexpensive, yet versatile.

Dye from madder root could produce the bright orange,

the paler and duller oranges and the chocolate browns in these prints.

The calico printer treated the yardage with different mordants (metal salt solutions such as iron or aluminum) and dipped the cloth in a single dye bath made from madder root. Each mordant reacted differently with the dye, producing colors ranging from red-orange through purple, brown, and almost black. The madder coloring agent would not bind to areas that were not mordanted.

Madder is a vegetable dye derived most efficiently from a perennial plant with the Latin name of Rubia tinctorum. Like many dye plants, it is an Asian native. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist who traveled to Asia in the first century AD, described the amazing transformation of a piece of cloth treated with colorless mordants emerging from the dyebath in a rainbow of shades. The plant and its secrets traveled to Europe where madder thrived in Italy, France, Holland, and Spain. Other names for the dye are al izarin in Arabic and garance in French.

Madder produced a plum colored purple known as puce.

Madder was particularly popular with quilters between 1840 and 1890.

Madder dyeing produced a brick red or orangey-red,

not the bright red that the Turkey red process did. The browns tend toward reddish.

Photograph from the late 1850s(?)

A print skirt and a big dog.

Reproduction Quilt

Sorghum Taffy Strip Quilt

made from my Civil War Homefront collection from 2009.

Blues and honey-colored yellows accent the madder-style prints.

Prints from two Moda collections: Civil War Homefront and Civil War Reunion

In my latest Moda reproduction collection Civil War Reunion I've colored several prints in a Dusty Rose colorway with an authentic madder orange. It's a shade to buy when you see it as the color so popular in 1860 might not be available in the future.

Document and Reproduction: Union Print

It's always a thrill to come across a piece of patriotic fabric. This one in madder colors may date to the actual time of the Civil War but it's also likely to date anywhere from 1861 to 1890. After 1890 madder-style colors became old-fashioned.

The Grand Army of the Republic was the name

 of the Union Army veterans group.

Notice the GAR poster in the window in this postcard about 1910.

The print may have been associated with the War as a patriotic Northern image or it may date from the  Centennial in 1876 when numerous patriotic prints were made to celebrate the re-union of North and South.

For my Moda collection Civil War Reunion we copied the madder orange colors in the original and re-colored it in bright blue and buff shades as well as madder brown and madder red.

I hope to find re-enactors making clothes for toddlers and shirts for soldiers from this print.

A "Living Flag" at a Union Army veteran encampment in 1908

The black and white photo of people wearing blue and red has been recolored.

We would be unlikely to find a similar print for the Confederacy as the North had the printing factories, while the South had the raw cotton.

Here's another patriotic print we reproduced a few years ago.

The original was in a top from the 1840s or '50s.

And this one was in a block cut from an antique quilt that had fabrics from about 1840 to 1880. Notice the flag stripe in the brown triangles. Three of those are the document print and one (the darker one is the reproduction.) The original is probably from 1876.

See more about Centennial-era patriotic prints in this post:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/04/centennial-prints.html

Brown: In and Out of Fashion

Lost Ship by Barbara Brackman, 2002

Bonnie bus asked:

How did repro fabric get to be so brown?

Unknown pattern, about 1890

Antique quilts were brown. There was a real fad for brown calicoes from about 1860-1890.

From my book America's Printed Fabrics 1770-1890:

Historian Lewis Mumford called the last years of the century The Brown Decades. “The color of American civilization abruptly changed. By the time the [Civil] war was over, browns had spread everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that beiged into black.” His perspective, looking backward, reveals a twentieth-century disdain for the color, but in the gilded age, the era of brownstone buildings, walnut furniture and chestnut-haired beauties, brown truly reigned.

We see two main shades of brown in the 19th-century color palette: reddish brown and greenish brown.

Sawtooth variation, about 1875 from Cowan's Auctions

Many of the reddish-browns, the warmer brown  prints, were dyed with madder dye which produced dark browns, burnt oranges, peachy browns, tans, and cinnamon reds.
 

 
Madder-style prints were very popular from about 1860 to 1890, but we also see them in patchwork dating back to the 1780s.
 
The greenish-browns or khaki shades came from a synthetic dye that produced olive, bronze and cooler browns. This color palette appeared about 1875 and remained popular until about 1890.
 
 

Small star top using lavenders and bronzey browns about 1880

 

Pale blue and pink were often part of this bronze palette

 After 1890 brown was passé and black, blue and gray quilts were the thing.
 

Four-patch, about 1910

 
When Mumford was writing about brown in 1931, it was considered hopelessly old fashioned. Quilters loved clear pastels and red and grayed green. But color fades in and out of style.

Hexagon medallion about 1940 from Laura Fisher

Brown quilts were again the thing in 1970. At the turn of the 21st century brown was the hot look in primitive, folky quilts.

Pomegranates and Berries by Jan Patek, 2008

Jan Patek's use of brown and her interpretation of antique quilts

has been quite influential in creating the "prim-folk look".

See her kit here:

http://www.janpatekquilts.com/catalog_i8716084.html?catId=110412

In the central United States where I live everyone was crazy for brown--- brownish reds, brownish greens, flat blues, tan, tan, tan. There was no true white. We always said brown was a Christmas color. The brown fashion was one reason reproduction prints became so popular. The late-19th-century aesthetic shaped our taste.

Decorating magazine picture from about 1980

Union Square by Pamela Mayfield, 2001

Buy a copy of Pam's Union Square pattern here:

http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/p-6522-union-square-by-sunflower-co-op.aspx

Taste changes and now everyone (like Bonnie) is talking color--- true, clear colors.

So all those browns, whether antique prints or turn of the 21st-century reproductions, might look dull to fans of chartreuse and shocking pink (a revival of the colors of the 1950s and '60s).

The brown color palette was just one style in the 19th century. There were plenty of other fashionable looks.

Basket about 1880

And today browns remain important as authentic reproductions. Without browns, reproduction quilters would be at a loss. Plus those toned down colors are a great decorating palette. Brown is a classic neutral that goes well with wood.

Browns from my current Civil War Homefront collection for Moda

Triple Nine Patch by me and the Sew Whatever group, 2003

The pattern for this and the Lost Ship are in America's Printed Fabrics, which has some lovely brown quilts and fabric on the cover.