Preserving Our Quilt Legacy - Virtual Workshop

Might I suggest a new quilt adventure for your fall?  I am teaching an in-depth workshop focusing on repairing and caring for quilts.  Here's the scoop:

The workshop covers:
• restoration
• conservation
• preservation
• identification and dating
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• philosophies
• supplies
• techniques

We will start with the basic information in my book, Preserving Our Quilt Legacy, and explore the topics in more detail and with hands-on experience:
• lectures
• discussions
• "triage" sessions for students' quilts
• a library of how-to videos teaching stitches and repair processes
• specialty sessions (including how to run a quilt repair business and yoga for tired hands and shoulders)

Sewists, appraisers, and collectors - quilt lovers of all sorts - will all find useful information here.  

There is a maximum of 15 students, so everyone will have time for individual attention, and we'll have several Q&A periods.

 

The workshop takes place on 5 Saturdays, October 16 through November 13, 3 1/4 hours per Saturday, for a total of 16 1/4 class hours plus the set of how-to videos and other useful resources.

Class sessions will be recorded and available for students who have missed a session.  

Several of the lectures will be available separately for "alá carte" registration, as will private lessons and private triage sessions.  

I have 40 years of education gleaned from workshops, symposia, and reading, plus the experience of working with 400+ quilts.  I will be joined for some sessions by Martha Spark, who has long and deep experience with quilt restoration also.  My goal is to pass this knowledge on, and keep more quilt history alive.

Full description and registration can be found on my website:
https://www.annquilts.com/POQL_Workshop.html

Email me with any questions you may have:
annquilts@comcast.net

 

Quilt for an 1895 Wedding

I love a dated quilt.  I love a dated quilt with a family story (see full story below).  Combined together....well.... it's simply grand.

The fabrics have some preservation issues and staining throughout.  And at some point, a critter chewed a hole in the quilt and almost chewed a second.  The good part of that story is that the critter was polite enough to avoid chewing up any of the embroidered history.

#1

#2

Family Quilts: A Quilt from Every Generation for 150+ Years

A customer sent me a quilt for repair, and included photos of her collection of family quilts.  She gave me permission to share them with you here.  What a treat to have this many quilts passed down for so many generations!  And only one, the Grandmother's Flower Garden, was in need of repair.

The owner says:  

I have a quilt from every generation down through ones that my mother made for me and for her 9 grandchildren. My family tree goes back to the Mayflower as a direct descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullin; it also includes James Bell Stevenson, whose brother Adlai was VP of the United States and Secretary of War (equivalent now days to Secretary of State).  

(The owner's comments continue below in italics.) 

 
star (made by the owner's great-great-great-grandmother)
Made by Sara Ann McLure Marsilliott (12-19-1793/8-23-1868)
for her daughter Mary Jane Marsiliott           

tag:
Quilt by
Sara Ann McLean Marsilliat
(Mrs Jacob Marsilliat)
(1797-1868)

A Couple of Short Updates

 

1.  The Current Quilt Repair Job
What better way to spend some summer days than mending a mostly wool and flannel crazy quilt?  Well...yeah...I know...  I took this in-progress photo just for fun, and have decided I really like the photo as its own little piece of abstract composition.   

The dark fabrics are wool, the check is cotton flannel, and the red and white leaves are a woven upholstery-weight fabric.  It had pulled out from under the binding and frayed.  I took the photo when I was in the midst of inserting a nicely matching piece of wool, the bottom edge of which is turned under and stitched to the binding, the top edge of which is underneath the turn under of the fancy fabric.

Broken Star....Mended

The color play on this quilt is spectacular!  

This turned patching some of the diamonds into one of those good news / bad news situations.  Good news: the quilt is gorgeous.  Bad news: it really, really needs the perfect patching fabrics so as to not detract from the wonderful color play.

There were just a few diamonds damaged.  So it could have been a relatively quick job, but it wasn't....

Family Names on a Signature Quilt - Part 3

Well, well, well.  The story continues.  The backstory for this post can be found in two previous posts:

Flexner Family Names on a Signature Quilt
...in which researching names on a 1910 quilt traced the relationship between those people and my ancestors.

Family Names on a Signature Quilt - Part 2
...in which I was contacted by relatives of the people whose names are on the quilt, and they confirmed that whole new (to me) branch of my family.  The discussion left many more unanswered questions of the exact ties between the two branches.

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And now for Part 3.  This chapter comes about because a second person came across these posts of mine while researching his own Flexner family history and wrote to me.  It didn't take much conversation to determine that we are indeed, also, related.  Our great-great-grandfathers (Moritz and Jacob) were brothers, so our common ancestors are our three-times-great-grandparents (Michael and Rebecca).  Isn't it marvelous to know the tree for that many generations?

A major question I had at the end of Part 2 was how the branch of the family on the Iowa quilt - descended from John Flexner - and my branch of the family - descended from Moritz Flexner - are connected.  The research of one of these new cousins of mine pretty well confirms that John was another brother of Moritz and Jacob.  They all emigrated and all headed branches of the Flexner family in this country.

My new-found cousin had traveled to the Czech Republic in 2019 as part of his research, and was able to locate and photograph the birthplace of my great-great-grandfather Moritz Flexner (b.1820) in Vseruby, Bohemia!  What a wonder!  He also found the birthplace of John and Jacob, in a different city, as the family had moved. 

A Log Cabin Quilt with Mystery

I really fell in love with this "homey" log cabin.  It's such a cozy look - and feel, too, as the fabrics are well-loved and very soft.

Family history says it was made in Virginia for the owner's mother, at or shortly after her birth, so in 1920-22.  The fabrics support that oral history, and it's a lovely collection of fabrics from the 1920s.

The mystery is that the top row of blocks was cut off at some point, and then reattached.  You can see that the straight furrow design reverses at the top row.  The reattaching was done by simply overlapping the two raw edges and stitching several rows of machine stitching with no attempt to neaten up the rough cut.