Crazy Embroidery 2: Imagery

Crazy quilts must have been fun to make. They're certainly fun

to look at, especially the earlier, more lavishly detailed examples from

the early 1880s until about 1900.

While China was supplying American factories with raw silk American needleworkers had access to a wide variety of inexpensive silks. Once that international trade ceased in the early 20th century crazy quilts continued as a popular style but more accessible wools and cottons replaced the now hard-to-get silks.

The later quilts are simpler in their imagery and variety, more

reliant on hand drawn imagery than commercial sources.

National Museum of American History

Smithsonian Collection

Earlier silk crazies were covered with pictorials. In this detail we see scraps from a rose brocade cloth, a pansy of filled embroidery, crossed flags in filled embroidery, an outline-embroidered child, perhaps two black ribbons with a linear and paisley floral and at the bottom a printed silk with a female figure. 

There do seem to be contrasting skill levels in some of the decoration---an intriguing circumstance, which has prompted me to look closely at the silk versions.

Bird & daisies skillfully done.

Moon......

It looks like this maker (not greatly talented at the linear stitches) made

use of ribbons sold for dress and hair trim.

Other incorporated ribbons were woven

pictorial Stevengraphs, this one a Washington

tribute with a little added embellishment.

Benjamin Harrison ribbon, perhaps a Stevengraph.

Harrison was president 1889-1893.

President Grover Cleveland served twice during the height of the

crazy fashion: 1885-1889 & 1893-1897.

Printed silks were less expensive than woven Stevengraphs. Political and commemorative

ribbons were popular additions. 

Illinois State Museum Collection

(They called them badges rather than ribbons.)

"Family Cares" a scrap of printed silk from???

New Jersey project & the Quilt Index

Pieced & appliqued patchwork was added, often fans---another silk fashion of the times.

National Museum of American History

Text, such as monograms drawn from the commercial sources of the day.

Florals done in three dimensions with folded ribbon and plushwork

National Museum of American History

Lydia Finnell---plushwork lily & owl

Painted florals 

Painted monogram on an Iowa quilt recorded

by the Massachusetts project & the Quilt Index

Odd scraps from other needlework projects....

But the major decorative imagery was embroidery using

filled and outline techniques.

National Museum of American History

Usually filled with a satin stitch.

1886 How-To on the Satin Stitch

1899 advice on what was also called the Kensington outline stitch,

named for the London needlework school that revived embroidery

in the late 19th century.

Barry in outline stitch. Read more about Barry here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2012/10/barry-in-outline-embroidery.html

Advertisement for a book with "Kate Greenaway designs for Doyleys, etc."

It's interesting that most of these commercial sources did not advertise their wares for crazy quilts---but of course the quilters appropriated any visual imagery they came across.

These nostalgic children were quite the fashion and many crazy quilts

include them. 

Sewing kit of leather with painted Colonial child---a "Kate Greenaway figure"

National Museum of American History

And then there are the scraps that appear to have been commercially

produced, purchased and attached.

Lancaster Historical Society

More about that tomorrow.

Crazy Embroidery 1

 

Crazy quilt dated 1886 & 1890

Quilts grow out of available fabric.

We've long noticed that rule in effect where crazy quilts are concerned. The high-style crazy quilt developed in the early 1880s, style characterized by random-shaped pieces of silk, embellished with pictorial embroidery in the patches and linear designs embroidered over the seams. 

The style made use of an abundance of inexpensive silk in the form of scraps from American silk mills and cutaways from clothing factories.

Smithsonian Collection

Unfinished crazy quilt attributed to Aimee Elkington Hodge (1865-1946)

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_556485

In 2020 Madelyn Shaw of the Smithsonian curated an exhibit Everyday Luxury: Silk Quilts from the National Collection, showing silk throws with history of the American silk industry, quoted below:

"These textiles tell a little known story about American industry, art, fads, and marketing....From the 1870s through the 1920s, the silk industry flourished in America. Paterson, New Jersey, then known as America’s “Silk City,” produced miles of silk fabric while Connecticut housed many silk-thread factories. Manufacturers marketed silk by giving away pattern booklets and thread holders. As industry competition increased, prices decreased, so much so that by the 1880s, even the girls and young women who worked in the factories could afford a silk dress for 'Sunday best'....Merchants sold packages of fabric samples, instructions for assembling them, and embroidery patterns to add an endless variety of designs and ornamental stitches."

Smithsonian Institution Collection

Chinese sericulture. The cocoons are being sorted on a table.

The United States has never been much of a silk producer, despite optimistic attempts to raise the silk worms and harvest filament from their cocoons. China has been the chief supplier of silk to the world for centuries. In the 1870s U.S. entrepreneurs began importing Chinese raw silk and manufacturing it into thread, yarn, cloth, decorative items and clothing. The price of the luxury item dropped.

Cheney Brothers was one of the largest silk cloth manufacturers.

Factory production on new machinery made silk affordable for many Americans.

Early 20th-c Gibson Girl look in a silk dress

costing about $9 from a Gimbel Brothers mail order catalog.

Gimbels' sold the dresses; the garment factory that stitched them bought the silk from one of the large American silk mills.

Garment factory employees, early 20th century

Cutting the silk to fit the human form created leftover "cutaways." Both the clothing factories and the silk mills sold packets of these small pieces.

Typical turn-of-the-20th-c crazy quilt made of silk

taffetas, brocades and velvets. 

Magazines aimed at women were full of ads offering remnants.

"Each box contains from 100 to 150 pieces...adapted to all kinds of art and fancy work [and] four skeins of the very best embroidery silk." The Paris Silk Agency was probably a wholesaler buying remnants and then retailing them.

Brainerd & Armstrong was another distributor of silk mill ends.

Waste embroidery: 1 -3 yard pieces of silk thread.

From Louise Tiemann's Collection

It's her birthday week and we are celebrating

by posting about late-19th-c embroidery, her favorite topic.

See her blog post on this artifact:

http://quiltpapers.blogspot.com/2017/02/brainerd-armstrong-waste-embroidery-silk.html

Gold silk thread was a popular choice for

the embroidery in these earlier crazy quilts (1880-1900)

Girl winding silk threads or yarns in the 1920s

Filoselle was another inexpensive thread, manufactured from

silk seconds---filaments not suitable to weave into cloth.

In 1884 Peterson's Magazine advised you

to use filoselle for the butterfly. At the top of

the page: silk embroidery for the "new patchwork."

For a summary of the inexpensive silk phenomenon see the paper Patricia Cox Crews published in 2010. Read Fueled by Silk: Victorian Crazy Quilt Mania at this link:

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=tsaconf

Tomorrow: Imagery on crazy quilts.