Winter Museum Season is Over

A tile quilt from the collection of  Nancy Pfutzenreuter

See West Branch, Iowa, below for information about

 Patterns of the Past: A Century of American Quilting at the Herbert Hoover Museum

On my webpage I try to keep track of museum exhibits featuring antique quilts. I noticed the winter season is coming to an end with several shows closing in March.

Here's your last chance to see these exhibits.

Charleston, South Carolina.
The Charleston Museum's ongoing rotation of quilts from the collection features as this year's exhibit 12 crazy quilts, coming down March 28th. For more information click here: http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/topic.asp?id=25


Churchtown, Pennsylvania.
Historic Poole Forge is hosting Quilts In The Mansion II, a display of fifty antique quilts for one week from March 22-27. Click here for information: http://www.historicpooleforge.org/events/details/quilt_show/

Lincoln, Nebraska.
The International Quilt Study Center and Museum's Four-Part Harmony: The Linda Carlson Four-Block Collection comes down March 28th. http://www.quiltstudy.org/discover/exhibitions/upcoming.html?upcoming_item=60714&db_item=listitem

Detail of a hexagon quilt with a silk portrait of

Queen Victoria from the Tanenbaum collection

Toronto, Ontario.
The Textile Museum of Canada's Kaleidoscope: Antique Quilts from the Collection of Carole and Howard Tanenbaum, comes down March 21, 2010. http://www.textilemuseum.ca/apps/index.cfm?page=exhibition.detail&exhId=306

Inlaid wool quilt

Vienna, Austria.
Das Österreichische Museum für Volkskunde. Inlaid-Patchwork in Europe from 1500 to the Present comes down March 14. Click here for more information and see their press page for photographs: http://www.volkskundemuseum.at/?id=225

Quilt made for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair contest

from Nancy Pfutzenreuter's collection

West Branch, Iowa.
The Herbert Hoover Museum's Patterns of the Past: A Century of American Quilting comes down March 21st. The show features Nancy Pfutzenreuter's collection.  http://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/Quilts/QuiltingExhibit.html

Keep track of museum exhibits on my webpage by clicking here:
http://www.barbarabrackman.com/faqs1.aspx

It's time to plan spring and summer travel.

Designing Fabric

Moda boasts a variety of fabrics from a variety of designers. Each of us works in different ways. I wish I had the computer skills to generate a digital design or the painting skills to paint a croqui, pronounced croak-ee, the word for a painted fabric design, which comes from the French word for sketch.

Sandi Gervais paints her designs. See her blog Pieces of My Heart for insight into how she works.

http://piecesfrommyheart-sgervais.blogspot.com/2009/07/process-of-fabric-designing.html

Jennifer of Tula Pink generates her designs in the computer. These blog postings show how she works.

http://tulapink.com/2010/02/21/building-plume/
http://tulapink.com/2010/02/28/the-changing-of-the-guard/  

My skills are 1) hoarding, 2) sorting. I have a huge collection of antique fabric scraps so reproducing antique fabric is my niche at Moda. Most of the scraps came from my friend Joyce Gross. Others were gifts from collectors like Bets Ramsey, Katy Christopherson, Mary Sue Hannan and Arnold Savage. I also buy antique fabrics to fill holes in the collection and occasionally I come across an old top in terrible shape that I can unpiece.

The worn top I used for color inspiration and a few swatches for Civil War Homefront lies under the strike-offs, which are the first fabric proofs of the actual reproductions. The ones with the white dots wound up in the line. It is hard to choose.

Because I love to sort I have classified the swatches into notebooks by color, by figure style, by date, by subject matter. I keep the scraps in archival plastic notebook pages and move them around. One year I might sort them by era, another by dye. This keeps me entertained by the hour, the way my mother's button box used to.

When I think of a historical theme for a new collection I re-sort.

Archival baseball card holders work great for the small pieces.

Right now I am working on another Civil War line for the 150th anniversary year of the beginning of the War. I'm also doing a late 19th-century collection in fall colors like the scraps below. (You have to wait till summer to see that fall fabric.)

Once I choose a theme and fabrics that date to that era, I choose a palette based on historical colors. If it's Civil War-era the colors have to mimic natural dyes. I like copying late-in-the-century prints because I can have blacks and different greens, purples and other shades that came from test tubes.

The colors have to work across all the pieces in the collection---the hardest part for me, because I have to imagine how the purple is going to look as a background as well as the figure. If I were better at computer imaging I could actually see that but right now I have to imagine.

Strikeoffs of the reproductions atop a quilt block

 of the original for Poke Salad

in the Civil War Homefront collection.

I had several to pick from and chose based on authentic color palettes as well as considering how it would fit into the overall collection. The original fabric is called the document print.

I send the document prints to Texas, where they go on to Japan for design and Korea for printing. Most of the time I get them back a year or so later. I send a cut with just the minimum repeat in case I don't get the antique swatch back from across all those geographical and language barriers.

I've been taking a class in Photoshop but I imagine I will always work with the actual swatches. That way I can justify shopping for antique swatches and storage space for all those notebooks.

Tracey Brookshier & Friends

Daisy Star by Tracey Brookshier

Among the  most innovative pattern companies today is Tracey Brookshier Design Studios.
Here's an artist statement from Tracey a few years ago:

I am inspired by antique graphic quilts with strong lines and repetitious forms. My quilts are original, though some are based on traditional block patterns. Fabric always drives the design - I buy something wonderful and figure out how to use it in a way that pleases me. I want viewers to say ‘Wow!’, when they see one of my quilts on a wall.

Crystal Lattice by Tracey Brookshier

She designed one of the most successful patterns ever. The rest of us pattern designers can only sigh when we look at the numbers---thousands and thousands of Bento Box patterns1 and 2 have been sold. But her success is well deserved.

Tracey doesn't design all her patterns. Here are two designed by friends:

Sudoku designed by

Susan Maynard Arnold

Sue Arnold realized you could translate a Soduko puzzle to 9 fabrics.

I pirated this picture of Sue from the site of the East Bay Heritage Quilt Guild.

Suduko with 9 fabrics on the right, with 16 on the left.

Sudoku

by Georgann Eglinski

Georgann's been making Sue's Sudoku quilts of Japanese fabrics.

 She cut leaves out of a print and appliqued them atop the version below.

Tracey's also published a pattern from Miriam Nathan Roberts's series of Interweave quilts.

Rainbow Interweave by Miriam Nathan-Roberts

Interweave by Georgann Eglinski

Georgann took a workshop from Miriam and made this wall quilt.

"Value is the Key"

Tracey's patterns are so "wow"-inducing that people often make them but forget to give her and the artists credit.

(Isn't that a nice way of putting it?)

Check out Tracey's website and her patterns here:

http://www.traceybrookshier.com/brookshier-design-quilt-patterns.html

And see Miriam Nathan-Robert's impressive work by clicking here:
http://www.miriamnathanroberts.com/

Garden of Eden

Adam & Eve, appliqued by Shauna Christenson, 2001, 84" x 84"

Designed by Barbara Brackman and Karla Menaugh from 19th-century quilts.

Our Sunflower Pattern Co-operative was a group of women with various talents working together to reproduce vintage applique designs. My talent is researching and drawing the patterns. Among Shauna's many talents is applique. Karla's talent with this pattern was editing and publishing.

I'd been collecting photos of quilts in this Garden of Eden design ever since I realized there were two similar quilts at the Smithsonian Institution and the Johnson County (Kansas) Museum.

Garden of Eden Quilt 86" x 75" Estimated date: 1850-1880

Collection of the National Museum of American History.

 Gift of Dorothy Diffey Beldsoe in memory of Laura Doty Diffy.

Maker unknown, purchased in Fort Smith, Arkansas about 1900.

Garden of Eden Quilt

By Sylvia S. Queen (1804-1896), probably in LaPorte County, Indiana. Estimated date 1850-1880.

Collection of the Johnson County Museum

This quilt has been over dyed a purplish gray, accidentally or deliberately.

The similarities in this pair are the human figures telling the tale of Paradise, Eve's encounter with the snake and the banishment from Eden. In both the Victorian-era quilts the figures are clothed, Eve in a hoop-skirted silhouette. Also similar are the large multi-lobed florals and the winding grape vine. The Smithsonian believed that the two quilts must be by the same person---Sylvia Queen---but that is assuming too much, like saying that Mary Evans made all the Baltimore Album quilts.

I drew the pattern for Shauna's quilt by combining images from the quilts above.

Five years later Doyle Auctions sold this quilt for $7,000 in 2006. At points north, east and west are human figures telling the Biblical story. The center with the solar system is quite similar to the Smithsonian's. It looks to date from 1840-1880 based on the fuzzy photos.

Again the grape vine border and flat multi-lobed florals frame the center.

The Pilgrim-Roy Collection once had a fourth quilt in this group with the same solar system center enclosed by a scalloped circle.

Eve handing the apple to Adam is nearly identical to the version above.

I don't have an overall photo. What makes this quilt different from the others is the paisley-shaped Broderie Perse applique shapes. Based on the blues and chintzes in the detail shots I'd say this is the oldest of the four, possibly 1840-1860.

If there are four of these quilts with the hoop-skirted figures and the optional central solar system, there may be more. Right now I would have to conclude it was a pattern passed around hand to hand in the mid-to-late 19th century.

To read more about the Pilgrim Roy Collection click here:

http://www.pilgrimroy.com/

See another Garden of Eden quilt by Josephine Miller Adkins in the collection of the Museum of the Daughters of the American Revolution:

http://www.quiltindex.org/basicdisplay.php?pbd=DARMuseum-a0a0r4-a

A late-19th-century version at Colonial Williamsburg.

http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp?action=newpage&style=single&singlepage=6&searchxml=%3CeMuseum%5Fsearch+site%3D%22Colonial+Williamsburg%22+date%3D%222010%2D02%2D22%22%3E%3Ccriteria%3E%3Cparams+searchcode%3D%22%2D1%22+pagesize%3D%226%22+currentpage%3D%221%22+orderfield%3D%22%22+orderdir%3D%22%22+profile%3D%22objects%22%2F%3E%3Cbasic+criteria%3D%22quilt%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fcriteria%3E%3C%2FeMuseum%5Fsearch%3E%0D%0A&style=browse&pagesize=6¤tpage=1&page=search&browsepagesize=6&searchtype=basic&profile=objects&wandering=no&term=quilt&basicterm=quilt&pagetotal=133&pagestart=1&pageend=6

The Cat's Meow has posted a detail of a quilt made from our Adam & Eve quilt

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/photo/1334380180051689367iLHcZD

You can buy the pattern for Shauna's quilt at Quilters Warehouse

http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/p-6525-adam-eve-by-sunflower-co-op.aspx

The Douglas County Bank Quilt

The Douglas County Bank Quilt

The Seamsters' Union Local #500

Lawrence, Kansas

1987

Collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum

A member of the Seamsters' Union was scrolling through the quilts at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum website recently and came across this quilt that our sewing group made in 1987.

Developers and preservationists were at odds. The above mentioned bank, situated at the edge of a lovely Victorian neighborhood, felt they needed a giant parking lot and bulldozed a block of houses at dawn one morning before any one could protest that the historic buildings were worth saving.

We had no preservation organization and no state laws with any teeth in them to prevent such destruction. Those of us who valued the architecture in our historic town could do nothing but watch in frustration.

[These photos aren't of the neighborhood---but one crushed house looks pretty much like another crushed house.]

We did take our money out of the bank---emptying several accounts amounting to the high two figures.

The Seamsters decided we'd strike back with a quilt depicting the bank as the aesthetic villains they were.

 Our inspiration was a quilt Jean Ray Laury'd made about a California earthquake in which she silk-screened broken houses.

 One Seamster recalls:

"I remember stenciling the border caption, and I remember making and cutting up house blocks. My most vivid memory is setting it up on a quilt frame at the public library and inviting people to stitch on it until [representatives of the banking and development interests] pitched a fit and got us thrown out."

We then moved the quilting frame to a public park and spent some summer evenings quilting the bank's logo into the background. The quilt was published in Americana magazine, April 1988. We raffled it off to raise money to start a preservation organization. The lucky winner has apparently donated it to the IQSC.

The words we stencilled on the border:

Douglas County Bank Quilt. June 27, 1987, The Most Destructive Single Day in Lawrence Since Quantrill's Raid.

A depiction of Quantrill's Raid during the Civil War when the town was burned.

See our quilt at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum's website by clicking here:

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/07fb2ea5-ba57-458a-b6cf-d928567b1957.jpg

My New Hobby

Uh-oh. I've got a new addiction and it isn't pretty. Well it is pretty literally, but figuratively???

I've always wondered at those people who could make quilts out of one pattern piece. Dullsville.

But as I say: "Uh-Oh."

I started to make a pincushion. Download the free pattern here:
http://www.unitednotions.com/fp_prairie-flower-pincushion.pdf



I had a charm pack of my reproduction prints from The Morris Workshop from Moda. Each 5" square was cut into quarters so I had four squares of each print 2-1/2" x 2-1/2".

I didn't use their machine method but used a glue stick to lightly glue a template behind each square. Then I folded the edges over to make a hexagon and whip-stitched them together by hand.

When I got the first ring done I was hooked.

I wondered how many rings I could get out of a charm pack.

Very soon I forgot about the Prairie Flower pincushion and started thinking medallion.

Center of an early 19th century medallion quilt from the Winterthur Museum

Reproduction of a 19th-century medallion by Bertha Stenge 1945

A soldier's quilt of wools

I needed one more light print so I got one from the first Morris reproduction line A Morris Garden.

Now I have to go out in the sleet/snow wintery mix and get more hexagon paper templates.
 
Once you get an outside row stitched you can take out the templates in the inside row. I can reuse them 2 or 3 times but now I need more. Way more.
 
Stay tuned. It could get bad.
 
 

Albert Small's hexagon mosaic quilt with the most pieces in the world, 1945

See more about Albert Small and his hexagon addiction by clicking here:

http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/behind/htmls/cr_bas_smhist.html  

And find more inspiration by clicking to see these museum quilts:

Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/european_sculpture_and_decorative_arts/quilt/objectview.aspx?OID=120047631&collID=12&dd1=12  

International Quilt Study Center and Museum
http://www.quiltstudy.org/includes/photos/quilt_database/large/2006_035_0001.jpg