Passion for Prussian Blue: Free Pattern

Repro Block: By Ddwgram

What's your favorite color?

This week mine is Prussian blue!

Vintage quilt, date-inscribed 1850

Prussian blue dyed both the dark blue ground and the lighter shades in the figures above. The contrasting color was often a tan called buff.

Wishful thinking.

It's not too late to get caught up in a mid-19th-century madness---160 years later.

Repro Block By Shawn

Repro Block by Becky Brown

Over at my Civil War Quilts blog I'm doing a free online class in reproduction fabrics in the form of a QuiltAlong. Week 2 in Stars in a Time Warp featured Prussian Blue.

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2015/01/stars-in-time-warp-2-prussian-blue.html

Vintage quilt, 1840-1860

Prussian blue is a mineral dye that could color both figures and grounds a wide

range of blue. In the 1840s and '50s there was a rage for bright blues in

clothing and quilts.

Vintage block, mid-19th century

The other blue commonly seen in antique quilts is indigo blue,

which generally lacked Prussian blue's brilliance.

Mid-19th-century quilt auctioned at Sotheby's

Indigo is much more conservative in color.

Repro Block: Amy

Our virtual sewing group at Civil War Quilts is doing great at picking reproduction prints.

Repro Block: Valerie

Reproduction block by Anita Lozcalzo,

made for a group project.

Anita Lozcalzo loves Prussian blue too. Her exhibit A Passion for Prussian Blue focuses on this brilliant dye. See it at the New England Quilt Museum before April 4, 2015.

http://www.nequiltmuseum.org/

Vintage quilt

Prussian blue sashing was quite the thing in the 1840s & '50s.

Here's a detail of a vintage quilt from the NEQM show. The maker

thought the Prussian blue sashing was so stylish

she didn't need patchwork anywhere else.

Repro Block by Ddwgram

Repro Block by VictoriaCarroll

Repro Block by SF

Vintage quilt--Note the range of blues---blue-violet

to almost green---dark blue to pale.

Repro Block: VictoriaCarroll

Repro Block: Becky Brown

Vintage quilt piece from

Rocky Mountain Quilts

Scroll down for an EQ7 pattern for a 45-1/4" square quilt of

6 inch blocks with 2" finished sashing. You could piece

25 Prussian blue stars into Prussian blue sashing.

Prussian blue reproduction

from Union Blues, my current Moda collection.

This print is #8298-14.

Sketch for a reproduction quilt echoing the decades 1840-1860.

I set the edge triangles with Metropolitan Fair (#8232)

I Photoshopped the reproduction stars above into the EQ sketch..

If that pink is tooooo much...

A light blue cornerstone might be calmer.

45-1/4"

The Pattern from EQ7

EQ7 calculates your number of patches and yardage for you. 

You Need:

• 25 Star Blocks finishing to 6" (light gray above)
• 54 Prussian Blue Sashing Strips (dark blue above) cut to rectangles 6-1/2" x 2-1/2".
• 40 cornerstones (pink) cut  2-1/2" square.
• 12 edge triangles (medium blue). Cut 3 squares 9-3/4". Cut each into four triangles with 2 diagonal cuts.

• 4 corner triangles. Cut 2 squares 5-1/8". Cut each into two triangles with a diagonal cut.

Yardage

EQ7 says you need

• Cornerstones: 3/8 yard
• Sashing Strips 1 yard
• Edge Triangles 5/8 yard

Then I tossed in a mitered border made from the Metropolitan Fair stripe of a few years ago.

Metropolitan Fair #8231

57-1/4" x 57-1/4" 

With a 6" finished border

Readers' blocks, my digital sketching.

Any gorgeous Prussian blue repro would do.

57-1/4" x 57-1/4" 

With a 6" finished border

If you want to add a border you'll need 1-3/4" yards.

• Cut 4 strips for mitered borders  6-1/2" wide x  57-3/4" long.

Repro Block by Cynthia

See more Prussian Blues old and new at Barbara Schaffer's blog:

http://barbaradschaffer.blogspot.com/2015/01/prepping-for-blizzard.html

One Ubiquitous Leaf Print

The original print

I was looking through the current quilts on the online antique sites

and came across this very nice detail shot of a very nice leaf print.

Wait a minute. I know that print!

The reproduction print Bloomington

The reproduction print is #8307 in my Richmond Reds fabric line.

Read more about the Bloomington print here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2014/10/richmond-reds-bloomington.html

The vintage version is set with the blue-on-blue print we tend to call Lancaster blue today---a good clue to a quilt from about 1870-1900. The other browns in madder-red shades could be 1840-1890 and the geometric brown looks to be that brown-on-blue style typical of the 1880s. So I am guessing

the quilt top is about 1870-1890.

It's that mid-to-late-19th-century look I was interpreting 

in both the Richmond Red and the Union Blues collections.

The coloring is updated, toned-down fashion.

BlockBase #3161

It took me a while to find the pattern in BlockBase because I was looking at is as a triangular block, but it's actually a square block placed on point. I found it in the category of two-patch blocks

with a basic structure like this.

A digital sketch of the block in the old top.

The triangles are seen as birds so it has several avian names, like Birds in the Air or Flying Birds, published in the 20th century. In her 1935 index to patterns Carrie Hall called it White Cloud...

White Cloud in 1951

 (probably because there is a town called White Cloud near her Leavenworth, Kansas home.)

Carrie Hall Sampler by Susan.

She finished it off with a border of the White Cloud Block

Birds in the Air quilt by Patti Mersmann Poe, 1996

Patti made this for my Quilts from the Civil War book in the '90s.

I should have recognized the block as I've often seen the bird names as symbolic of freedom and used it in Civil War reproduction quilts. See a post on the block from my 2011 Civil War Sampler block of the week here:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/02/9-birds-in-air.html

I guess it took so long for me to find the pattern, because I was too focused on the tree (the leaf print) rather than the forest (the patchwork pattern.)

While working on this post I found another vintage example of the leaf print

in a mid-century star quilt...

And then this one, a tumbler block

in a quilt dated "Centennial. 1876"

Both very much like my document swatch.

It's apparently a classic.

Kelly Cline used the red reproduction in her recent

top.

She used a pattern by Denniele Bohannon

published in the Winter 2015 edition

of Quilting Quarterly.

The other two fabrics she found in my garage sale when I sold off my boxes of chintz reproductions. I'd had those two prints for 20 years and hadn't done much with them. Kelly took off in a new direction.