The Lincoln Museum Quilt

Last year Gayle Curry wrote me an email saying she and her DAR group had decided to make a quilt from the pattern that Deb Rowden and I did for our book The Lincoln Museum Quilt.

 She continued:

"As you know, these things take on a life of their own and after a few phone calls we've been invited to display our quilt in Sacramento at the CALIFORNIA MUSEUM for History, Women and the Arts in conjunction with their Library of Congress exhibit honoring the anniversary of Lincoln's birthday. I've exhausted all resources in my area and checked on the internet; I'm unable to find enough fabrics. Our quilt, like yours is plaids and stripes. Do you have any idea where else to look? We're especially needing the lighter and medium fabrics." I did a web search for her and couldn't find a really good source of woven plaids and stripes in the lighter shades.

 Fabric follows fashion and wovens are not as popular now as they were three or four years ago. Well, don't tell Moda, but we told her to go to the thrift store and buy used clothing. Men's shirts, in particular, have a lot of great plaids and stripes in the lighter colors. 

 They finished the quilt. It will hang at the Museum in Sacramento for the summer. With Malice Toward None: Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibit will be up from June 24th through August 29th, 2009.

2022 Update: The book is long out of print.

Strawberry Thief

Strawberry Thief by Georgann Eglinski

William Morris, the English designer who was one of the founders of the Arts & Crafts movement, is famous for his tapestries and wallpaper patterns, intricate interpretations of his garden. The Strawberry Thief, a thrush stealing fruit, is one of his best loved. His daughter May recalled he told the gardeners not to scare away the birds as he loved to watch them enjoying their ill gotten gains.

I've simplified the image of one bird for appliqué. A pattern sheet for an 18" mini-quilt or pillow is available from Star books. Click here:
https://www.pickledishstore.com/categories.php?CID=102

Georgia Tulips

Tulip by LeeAnn Decker 62" x 72"

The tulip quilt with its 16-inch blocks was inspired by a quilt on the cover of Anita Zaleski Weinraub's Georgia Quilts. The cover quilt top was made by Annie Parham Howard in Morgan County in 1960.

That quilt is truly inspirational. I did the quilt below in Kaffe Fassett's stripes and Dorothy LeBoeuf did a smaller version with the checked binding. There's a pattern for mine on page 123 of my 2008 book Making History: Quilts & Fabric 1890-1970.

Document & Reproduction: Civil War Crossings

The photo shows three document prints---the design sources---for fabric in my Moda collection Civil War Crossings. The document prints are on the outside of the logo for the fabric. All are what the dyers called "madder-style prints," dyed with madder root. Using different metal salts for mordants, dyers could obtain a number of different shades of brown and red from a blackish brown to a peachy pink. They only had to dip the fabric in a single dyebath to get all those colors, one reason that madder was so popular in the mid-nineteenth century, when these cottons were probably printed.

For the reproductions on the left we toned down the white---the brightest color in the prints. Mid-nineteenth-century fashion liked a spotty print, but too many white spots can be a little distracting in a quilt. We left the highest values in for the prints on the right. A bit of regular dramatic pattern is so-o-o Civil War.

Jerrye Van Leer's Broken Crockery mini-quilt features several prints from that 2008 collection.

John Hewson

I've been studying the prints of John Hewson, a Philadelphia wood block printer who was in business from 1774 to about 1820. He's sometimes credited as America's "first calico printer," but there's no way to know who was America's first calico printer. Several people left records earlier than Hewson, though.

The bird is from a snapshot of a Hewson print I took at an exhibit at the Winterthur Museum a year or two ago.

I made a list of all the quilts and counterpanes featuring Hewson's fabric that you can see online. Here's one from the Winterthur.
http://content.winterthur.org/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/quilts&CISOPTR=380&CISOBOX=1&REC=2

To see more go to my web site http://www.barbarabrackman.com/---to the subpage "Quilt History."
http://www.barbarabrackman.com/faqs2.aspx
At the bottom you'll see a list of clickable quilts.

I am going to do a luncheon Roundtable Discussion called "America's First Calico Printer" at the American Quilt Study Group seminar in San Jose in October. It's time to start signing up so click here to find out more about the seminar.
http://www.americanquiltstudygroup.org/seminar.asp

M-m-m-m Cake!

Birthday Cake by Wendy Turnbull

Here's a low-calorie cake that we've been making in my sewing group. Above one slice of red velvet by Wendy; a cake quilt for Sarah who makes birthday cakes for us all year round and at the top another version by Bobbi Finley, whipped up from The Morris Garden reproduction collection I did for Moda. The Morris Garden fabric should be in the quilt shops in July; the pattern for the Birthday Cake is available from C&T Publishing or your local quilt shop.

http://www.ctpub.com/birthday-cake-pattern/

Serpentine Stripes 2

Celine sent a photo of her grandmother wearing a dress of serpentine stripes. The fashion for these snakey stripes (hence the name) was revived at the end of the century and here we have a woman at work about 1895 wearing a fashionable but serviceable dress. Celine writes that Ellen Mason Grable is standing to the left of her husband Silas Grable. The other men were his brothers, salmon fisherman and loggers in Ilwaco, Washington.

She also writes: "It's funny how us quilters always notice the fabric!"