Sleuthing Around a Quilt - Part 1 The Date and Story

I always love to see a quilt with vintage repairs.  Well, I've maybe coined a new term!  What I mean is that the quilt has been patched in the past by other folks who cared for it.  Vintage repairs speak volumes about how much history and love and meaning quilts can carry.

So here's an example of a cheerful quilt with vintage repairs that just visited my studio.

Women's Rights Quilt

I was just browsing through the Met Museum quilt collection and happened upon this quilt.  Boy, did I get excited!

Photo: Hearts and Hands: Women, Quilts, and American Society, 1987.

Just to toot my own horn a tiny bit:  When I first started teaching quilting in the early 1980s with little 6-week beginner classes, one of my students brought in an old quilt that was in her family.  I didn't know then nearly what I know now about quilt history, but I knew enough to be utterly amazed and urged the owner to treat it like the incredible piece that it is.  It did get exhibited and then published a couple of times (including in one of my all-time favorite books, Hearts and Hands: Women, Quilts, and American Society by Elaine Hedges, Pat Ferrero and Julie Silber, Quilter's Digest Press, 1987).  And now, oh boy oh boy, I see it's become part of the collection at the Met!!!  I feel like the beaming godmother!

The quilt was made in Illinois c. 1875.  It has both botanic appliqué designs and unique and detailed pictorial blocks showing the social history of the time.  There are some pictures that refer to the Civil War and some to the question of women's rights that sprouted during the war years.  Along with the quilt, the family had a piece of paper with captions and sometimes comical commentary for the pictorial blocks.  Such an incredible treasure!

You can read more and take a closer look at the Met collection entry.  The quilt is also described on the Quaker Quilts page in an article titled "Quaker Causes and the Women's Rights Quilt."

Enjoy!

Mending, Mending, Mending

Well, if you have visited my blog before, you know that what I do is a whole lot of mending.  For those of you are who new here, my profession is repairing antique/vintage quilts and clothing. For example:

I mended this unfortunate tear in a mid-19th century tulip appliqué quilt.

 

I replaced missing beading on a gorgeous wedding dress. 

Just For Fun Embroidery Projects

Tablecloth update:

Having finished embroidering and doing the cutwork in all but one corner, the tablecloth is on hiatus.  My daughter is going to finish up the last corner so we will end up with an heirloom stitched by three generations.  The whole story of the tablecloth is elsewhere on this blog.

Next project:
I always like to have some carry-along needlework at the ready to fill tedious waiting times and to doodle away on when watching some show with loads of commercial breaks.  So.....

A Tale of Two Dresses

My buddy Julia over at Basya Berkman Vintage finds the best stuff!  In the last couple of weeks, she's given me two really delightful dresses to mend.  They are from different decades even though they are similar in style.  Both prints are great, and they are really what inspired me to share the dresses here.

The older one is rayon, probably 1940s.  I absolutely love the color combo in the print!  The dress has shoulder pads, self-covered buttons, and - my favorite detail - velvet covered piping at the collar and sleeves.

Stitching Our Stories

Stitching Our Stories is an exhibit currently running in Santa Fe through October 20.   It's at the Santa Fe Arts Commission’s Community Gallery, 201 W. Marcy Street.  The use of needlework to express  family and social history is one of my favorite topics.  I'd go for sure if I was anywhere close!

The subtitle is:  Connecting Immigrant and Local Communities Through Story Cloths and Conversations.

The programs and exhibit were created by Art and Remembrance, an organization founded around the needlework panels made by Holocaust survivor Esther Nisenthal Krinitz.  The panels illustrate her memories of her early life in Europe and her escape from the Holocaust as a young girl.

Art and Remembrance has created a program called HeART and Story which guides recent immigrants to create their own story cloths about their journeys.  Their work is also on display. 

You can see the lovely Esther Krinitz panels in a book, Memories of Survival, and a video Through the Eye of the Needle (which you can also purchase).

Seminole Patchwork

 

 

Here is my good friend Julia of Basya Berkman Vintage.  She usually is behind the camera photographing her models, but this time, I took the camera and photographed her in this great Seminole skirt.   As an anthropology major way back when who long ago became a quilter and then much more recently took on vintage clothing, mending this skirt was a real treat!

This is a patchwork style created and stitched by the Seminole Indians of Florida.  After the sewing machine and cotton fabrics were introduced to the Seminoles in the late 1800s, they developed their own patchwork technique by the 1920s.