Chords of Memory and Civil War Samplers

Elin Thomas sent a snapshot of her Chords of Memory Quilt, made from a pattern in my online club Underground Railroad Quilt Club for C&T Publishing.

Jean Stanclift's version of my Chords of Memory sampler

It's time to start thinking about your Civil War memory quilt to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the War in 1861. I'm going to post a block every week or so in the left column here from the online club and the Chords of Memory sampler.

You can subscribe and download patterns and history about the Underground Railroad by clicking here:

http://resources.ctpub.com/Clubs/BarbaraBrackmansUndergroundRailroadQuiltClub/tabid/57/Default.aspx

See Jun's Photo Gallery for her versions of the blocks.
http://bear-necessities.net/photo_album/thumbnails.php?album=7 

There are many samplers recalling the Civil War out there, most of them featuring traditional blocks. Among the most popular are Rosemary Young's books.

Women's Voices, a Civil War Quilt designed by Fabric Expressions

 

Judi Rothermel from Marcus fabrics has a new sampler The Civil War Tribute Quilt

I've been finding online pictures of the quilt Karla Menaugh and I did for our Sunflower Pattern Cooperative called War and Pieces

The one on the left is from Betty at Shady Wood Quilts

http://shadywood.blogspot.com/

On the right: Cynthia from Texas has posted hers

Nadine Kennedy was interviewed by the Quilt Alliance's Save Our Stories project

Click here to read the interview:

http://www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/qsos/interview.php?pbd=qsos-a0a6m9-a

The pattern is out of print, unfortunately.
I've done a few books on blocks to recall events in the Civil War. Both of these feature samplers and are still in print:

 

Carla Gay posted these blocks from Facts & Fabrications on the web

You can see more versions of the blocks by clicking here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/756536@N24/pool/

There are lots of samplers to choose from. Just don't make the mistake of starting a quilt that purports to tell the story of symbolism in the Underground Railroad. Historians agree that these supposed Quilt Code stories are misdirected history. If you make one you'll regret it as you get more familiar with quilts and Civil War history.

There is absolutely no way this Sailboat block, invented in the 1930s, could have anything to do with signals on the Underground Railroad. Don't fall for it. There were no quilt blocks used as symbols on the Underground Railroad.

Poison Green

The words Poison Green may bring a color to mind. Some think of the lime green we find in so many 19th-century quilts. Others see an institutional green or the Nile green in quilts from the 1930s and '40s.

Poison green is the topic of my subscription newsletter on dating quilts this week, so I've been doing research in Google Books, looking at 19th-century dye manuals to find out what shade the color is and how poison it was. There definitely was a poison green,  green dyes and pigments based on copper arsenate---arsenic. Chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) discovered arsenic's use as a coloring agent in 1778.

Variations became extremely popular for dyeing and printing cloth and wallpaper and, worst of all, for food coloring. Before pure food and drug laws the only testing was trial and error on the part of the consumer. Decades went by before people realized that coloring marzipan with copper arsenate was an extreme health hazard. Wallpaper and silks also could sicken, if not kill.

Scheele was a victim of his own chemical experiments, dying at 44 in 1786, long before Scheele's green was found to be poisonous.

A fashion plate from Godey's gives new meaning to the the term "fashion victim."

In the first half of the 19th-century green silk dresses were quite the mode. Fashionable homes required a Green Room---below is the Green Room at the White House about 1875.

 

By the 1860s people became aware of the toxic qualities in Scheele's green. Pale green fashion fell out-of-fashion, until a better, non-toxic mint green became available in the 1920s.

From what I can tell the arsenic greens produced a color much like the kitchen greens in our memory.

Someone's "before" bathroom remodeling photo. The tiles are plastic and the color is poison green.

Read more about Poison Green

http://www.popularscience.co.uk/features/feat17.htm

Read the history of the White House Green Room, a timeline of taste and the color green.

http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/floor1/green-room-history.htm

Buttons and Pearlies

I love this photo from the Library of Congress website showing piece workers in Williamsburg, Massachusetts about 1910. Lewis Hines's photo was meant to show us the injustices in child labor. This family makes a meager living stringing buttons, but the image just looks nostalgic today. That pile of buttons on the floor incites coveting and greed rather than an urge for reform.

That's a lot of buttons!

Makes me want to put them in a jar.

Every year my New Year's Resolution is to do SOMETHING with the jars of buttons I have been hoarding. Here are a few ideas:

1. Decorate Clothing

A Group of Pearlies in England

Pearlies are a Cockney folk tradition. Read more about them by clicking here:

http://www.cockneymuseum.u-net.com/pearlyintro.htm

2. Make a quilt

The one with the star is from an online auction. To read more about the other click here:

http://www.harveyantiques.com/collection.php?type=textiles&id=buttonquilt

And check this one out:

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/photo/1089187410037561967cjSYQf

(That quilt is really not Civil-War-era, more like 1890)

I made this small piece in memory of my late dog Lexie D. Mutt

For other ideas (some good, some---well you can decide on what direction your new hobby should go)

http://www.buttoncandy.org/?p=47

http://www.work4idlehands.com/weblog/images/2008/2008-10-October/AllyPally3/pages/5-Jars_jpg.htm

http://layersofmeaning.org/wp/?m=200406

http://www.dollheads.com/crafts/?p=80

One Hundred Years Ago

Time Travel

Let's imagine we wake up on New Year's Day a hundred years ago and make a New Year's Resolution to finish a quilt. What would be on our list of Have-To-Stitch for 1910?

Mother and daughter doing piece-work sewing in a New York City apartment. The calendar on the wall says 1910. Photo from the Library of Congress collection.

I keep a file of dated quilts I find on auctions online and I have just three date-inscribed 1910, all embroidered. The embroidered date above is from the crazy quilt below, not a fancy crazy, but one very typical of the early 20th century. The fabrics look to be cotton, wools and cotton-wool blends with no silks typical of earlier crazy quilts. Initials on the pieces make one think it might have been a friendship quilt in which various women signed their squares.

Another quilt date-inscribed 1910 (below)  is related to the crazy quilt fad. It might better be termed a string-pieced wool star with embroidery. It's fancier, an echo of the more lavish embroidery one would have seen about 1890. In those twenty years several things happened to create the look of the 1910 wool quilt. Most important was a trade embargo on imported silk from China. World trade definitely affects the look of quilts, and wars in China prevented western mills from obtaining silk. Americans responded with simpler crazy quilts made of wools and cottons. Another factor was the lowering of standards for hand work as the generation who grew up with a sewing machine in the house gave little value to exacting hand sewing.

 Below is a small star quilt in wools and wool blends. It's embroidered with that seam covering stitching so fashionable at the time. The T.W. who signed it used an old-fashioned cross-stitch style for her initials, but the more popular satin stitch for the date.

Crazy quilts and wool quilts wouldn't have been the only possibility on your list of quilts to make. You might have decided to finish your redwork embroidered quilt. Here's a quirky medallion style dated 1907.

 Pieced album quilts in blues, reds, grays, pinks and blacks were popular. Below is one dated 1911.

Another popular style was the two-color pieced quilt. Blue and white made the most of the variety of indigos available as in the two quilts below, an Ocean Wave dated 1907 in the quilting and an Irish Chain dated 1915.

Red and white quilts took advantage of the colorfast Turkey reds that didn't run like the newer synthetic red dyes. Below a sawtooth medallion dated 1908.

But the standard quilt was probably the scrappy blue, pieced quilt like this one dated 1908, probably made from a pattern distributed by Clara Stone who published quilt designs in magazines and a catalog. She called the larger star block Fish or Whirligig.

Quilters in 1910 had many pieced designs available through periodicals and catalogs and they made many but didn't date them. One thing that was probably not on your list (unless you lived in southeastern Pennsylvania) was an applique quilt. They were so-o-o 19th century.

Civil War Homefront Precuts, Stripes and Chaos Theory

This pre-Civil-War top was the inspiration for colors and prints in my Civil War Homefront collection for Moda. It had been a comforter cover; was worn into holes; taken apart and then a friend bought it to use some intact patches for repairs. It looks rather pastel in this summer shot in my yard because the light is shining through it. The photo of the good parts below shows the color and the prints better.

It's rather chaotic, a look I love about early quilts where the patchwork pattern and the fabric patterns compete for your eye. I always love a good fight.

You can see it's a four patch set in strips with setting triangles of the large stripes that were so popular for women's dresses in the 1840s and '50s. The strips are offset so the large triangles form a zigzag, which you can hardly notice because the random stripes are screaming, "Look at me!"

I decided to interpret this top when my Civil War Homefront fabric arrived. I took a precut package of 2-1/2" Jellyrolls and gave my friends in my sewing group 2 or 3 strips each and told them, since it was my birthday and I got to choose a project, that I would like them to make as many nine-patches as they could out of the strips and not to worry about contrast.

Then I set the nine-patches with stripes in a fashion similar to the original top.

I thought about setting the strips right next to each other, but decided that on the chaos-to-calm scale I was of a less chaotic frame of mind than the original crazy quilter. I didn't even try to offset them to create a zigzag. That might have hurt.

This was not working. Then I recalled this antique quilt, which I found on an online auction. It had been in the back of my mind and I am glad I had the picture.

Here's a cobbled together shot of the top, which is going to the quilter this week. Five pieced strips, six unpieced paisleys. Blue triangles at the top and bottom.

On the sliding scale of chaos-to-calm it fits me fine. Those randomly cut stripes may be too chaotic for you. You could fussy cut them. I also had trouble sewing them all in the same direction, but that's part of the chaos that appeals to me.

I'm posting a free pattern on my webpage. Click here to see it:

Sorghum Taffy Strip Quilt.

Document & Reproduction: Printed Plaid

Carte-de-visite photo of a young woman from

 Willimantic, Connecticut, in the 1860s

Every Civil War reproduction collection needs at least one printed plaid. Plaids can be woven, that is the warps and wefts are varicolored and produce square checks and plaids. Plaids can also be printed onto plain cotton, a style quite popular in the mid 19th century. Below is one I called Sorghum Taffy from my Moda collection Civil War Homefront.

Left: the document print; right: the reproduction from

Civil War Homefront, both in madder-style shades

Tintype of sisters in matching dresses of probable printed plaid.

The narrow silhouette indicates fashion of about 1870.

Left: madder-style printed plaid from about 1840-1860; right: about 1870-1890

Left: a mid-century printed plaid; right: later in the 19th century.

Printed plaids, although more expensive to produce, offer an advantage over woven plaids. They can be printed on the diagonal, a style impossible with varicolored warps and wefts.

Woven plaid set on the bias in a top from 1840-1860

Woven plaids are hard to date. This 150-year-old plaid could have been bought at a fabric store last week.

Mid-19th-century printed  plaid (with a double pink)

Sometimes the only way to tell a printed plaid from a woven plaid is by examining the frayed edge of a swatch to see if the warps and wefts are dyed in the yarn or printed later. In this case it's hard to tell because the printed dye colored the edge yarns so well. While examining it with a magnifying glass I realized I could turn it over. A woven plaid would be identical on both sides. This is not. As Homer Simpson would say: "Doh!" Of course, examining the reverse is not possible when identifying fabric in a quilt.