Quilt 1812: War & Piecing

Wholecloth Wool Quilts

2012-03-07T06:00:00.067-06:00

Detail showing a worsted wool quilt

The wholecloth wool quilt is an 18th-century American tradition that continued into the 1840s, particularly popular in New England and New York. The major variations are worsted quilts, calimanco quilts and linsey quilts (more in another post).

The earliest Massachusetts bedquilt so far discovered by that state's project is thought to date from the 1730s, "a greenish-brown worsted whole-cloth quilt." Lynn Zacek Bassett has diagramed the quilting pattern in Massachusetts Quilts, but there is no picture of the textile by Mary Abbott Bridges. If you know what worsted is you can imagine.

Worsted is a harder, smoother yarn than woolen yarn.

Woolen on the left, worsted on the right.

I can never remember what worsted is so I looked it up. Like other textile terms its meaning varies and meaning changes over the generations. When discussing early wool quilts people use the word worsted to mean the following:

Worsted- straight, long, parallel fibers in the yarn, giving a hard, smooth surface
as opposed to
Woolen - looser, rougher yarn giving a softer, fuzzier surface

Worsted is also the cloth woven from that yarn. Florence Montgomery in her book on vintage textile terms (Textiles in America 1650-1870) says it was a "lightweight cloth made of long-staple combed wool yarn," named after an English village named Worstead.

This quilt from an online auction looks to be a wholecloth worsted quilt. The quilting is not so fancy as in Mary Abbott Bridges's quilt.

The trouble with worsted fabric is that

it's hard to photograph because it absorbs the light

rather than reflecting it....

Which makes it dull.

So you don't find a lot of photos of worsted quilts.

See a picture of WillyWonky's wool wholecloth quilt here. It looks to be worsted

http://willywonkyquilts.blogspot.com/2012/02/details-of-new-very-old-quilt.html

We see a new interest in wool comforters about 1890, often featuring woolens rather than worsted. The major difference between the early wool quilts and the later examples is that the early quilts are quilted. The later quilts are usually tied. The Amish continued the tradition of quilted wools and combination wool fabrics into the twentieth century, so identification is sometimes problematic, but a quilted wool wholecloth quilt is a good clue to an early date.

The early wool quilts were often quilted with a fine worsted yarn.

Fancy wool quilts were made from a polished wool called calimanco, something Montgomery defines as a worsted stuff with a fine gloss upon it...."plain weave glazed calimanco in sold colors of deep indigo, light blue green, raspberry red and pink....[Calimanco] is found in coverlets quilted in patterns of large flowers and leaves backed with coarser wool linings." (I'm still confused though-because there are satin-weave calimancoes too.)

Wholecloth calimanco quilt by Esther Wheat,

Conway, Massachusetts, estimated date: 1790.

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

The reflective luster was obtained by calendaring the wool, running it through heated rollers that put a permanent polish on the fabric. Calimanco (calamanco), also called glazed wool, was usually an imported fabric, a luxury item. The shine remains and good photography highlights details in some beautiful quilts.

Calimanco was a popular clothing fabric in the 18th century, durable yet elegant. As it fell out of fashion it remained the clothing of the lower classes. One source of textile history is ads for runaway slaves, which often described clothing in detail as in this one from the New York Gazette in 1773, looking for Philis who absconded on Christmas wearing "a light couloured calimanco gown, a check apron, black silk cloak, and a black peelong bonnet..."

Calimanco was used for women's shoes too. Although it doesn't sound very sturdy surprisingly many

calimanco shoes have survived.

If you wanted to make a period wholecloth quilt you'd have a hard time finding the right wool today. You might be better off using a silk. Lynn Z. Bassett's drawings for Massachusetts Quilts will give you some design ideas.

See Lynn's essay on wool whole-cloth quilts in Kimberly Wulfuert's blog post by clicking here:

http://www.antiquequiltdating.com/Wool_Whole_Cloth_Quilts.html

And more about the Massachusetts Quilts book here:

http://www.massquilts.org/MassQuilts_Book.htm

See several wholecloth wool quilts in the collection of the Bidwell House Museum by clicking here:

http://bidwellhousemuseum.org/Collections/Quilts_overview_of_collection.htm

Read more about Esther Wheat's quilt here:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=7241&gkey=169

Florence Montgomery's 1984 dictionary of historical textiles has recently been republished with a foreward by Linda Eaton, textile curator at the Winterthur Museum. See a preview here:

http://www.amazon.com/Textiles-America-1650-1870-Florence-Montgomery/dp/039373224X#reader_039373224X

You might want to buy it directly from the Winterthur to support this important museum, its textile collections and its generosity in sharing information.

http://www.winterthurstore.com/category/117/Textiles.html

Read a preview of "Pretends to be free": runaway slave advertisements... By Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown by clicking here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=RF5LS46h_gIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=pretends+to+be+free&hl=en&sa=X&ei=s4cIT9G9C4G3twfSz8zjAQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=pretends%20to%20be%20free&f=false

7 Isabella Baumfree: Wool & Slavery in New York

2012-03-01T06:00:00.113-06:00

Wool quilt from an online auction.

Wools are harder to date than cottons because

they change so little over the decades.

Early-19^th-century needleworkers chose from a variety of bedcover styles with wool quilts--- pieced, embroidered and quilted--- an alternative to cotton or silk spreads. Some of the fabric in surviving wool quilts was imported: camblets, calimancoes and satinets---but much was domestic---worsteds, woolens, jeans cloth and hickory cloth.

Calimanco is satin-weave wool polished to look like silk with

reflective qualities perfect for elegant wholecloth quilts.

The reverse of many calimanco quilts is

utilitarian wool of coarser yarns in plain weave.

American wool production suffered in comparison to England's because of limited sheep stock. Domestic flocks made better mutton than fabric.

Raising sheep along the Hudson in Ulster County, NY

Upstate New York produced a good share of domestic wool at the turn of the 19th-century. Dutch-speaking descendants of Niue Amsterdam’s farmers continued to keep sheep as they had for generations. Embargoes and war inspired a few innovators to improve their flocks with Spanish merinos.

Breeding Merino with domestic herds

improved wool quality over the decades.

Isabella Baumfree, about 15 years old when the war began, was a slave in this Dutch-speaking rural culture South of Albany near the Hudson. Born in Ulster County about 1797 to James Bomefree or Baumfree (perhaps named " tree" in Dutch for his height, a gift to his daughter) and his third wife Bett.

Ulster County in yellow

By the end of the war the girl had been sold three times. She had given birth to a daughter Diana and was entering into a marriage with a fellow slave named Thomas by whom she had five more children.

Baroness Hyde-de-Neuville lived in America during the teens and painted this portrait of an enslaved washerwoman about Isabella's age.

For their children Isabella and Thomas had hopes for a future in freedom. Months after Isabella’s birth the state of New York had decreed that any slaves born after July 4, 1799 would be freed when they reached the age of 28 for men and 25 for women. Isabella, born before that date, was to remain enslaved for life. The children, born after 1799, would remain indentured for years. Diana, for example, could expect to be free in the 1840s, 25 years into the future.

Isabella about 1860. This photo shows her crippled hand, injured during slavery. Her master told her he'd extend her time as once injured she was of less use to him.

Laws changed after the war and a new date for freedom was set for all: the Fourth of July, 1827. Isabella’s master’s family decided to recoup some of their investment in her by illegally selling her seven-year-old son to an Alabama plantation where he would be enslaved forever. (Isabella went to court to reclaim him.) Her last duty as a slave, she wrote, was to spin 100 pounds of wool into the fall.

"The subject of this narrative was to have been free July 4, 1827, but she continued with her master till the wool was spun, and the heaviest of the 'fall's work' closed up, when she concluded to take her freedom into her own hands, and seek her fortune in some other place."

But in 1812-1814 this was all in the future. During the war Isabella's fate was to be a slave for life. And some of her fate was spinning wool.

Wool wholecloth quilt from an online auction.

We see no reflective shine in the photo so we can guess the fabric on the face is not the fancier polished wools.

Not only must we reconcile our images of domestic life in the teens with the concept of Northern slavery, we also have to reconcile slavery with the quilts made anywhere in the United States at that time.

Embroidered wool bedcover, New York, dated

December 26, 1815 and signed by Polly Delano

Who spun the wool for these blankets, spreads and quilts? Who wove it? Who quilted it? Who pieced it?

Wool quilt thought to have been made about 1820

from Laura Fisher's store

Once free, Isabella led an interesting life first as Isabella and later as Sojourner Truth. Read her Narrative of Sojourner Truth by clicking here.

http://www.africawithin.com/bios/sojourner_narrative.htm

A famous public speaker against slavery and for the rights of women, she spoke English with a Dutch accent. An excellent promoter, she made a living selling copies of her book and portraits of herself.

Isabella with her workbag.

She sold many card-sized portraits.

"I sell the shadow to support the Substance."

In March the topic will be early wool quilts

See below for information about these Sketches of America

It’s hard for us to reconcile the reality of slavery with our image of New York’s small country villages so far from a Southern plantation, but slavery was always there. We only know Isabella’s story because she reinvented herself in the 1840s as Sojourner Truth and dictated her best-selling Narrative of her life.

See information about Sketches of America here:
http://www.nyhistorystore.com/shop/art-architecture/baroness-de-neuville-sketches-america-1807-1822-book
See more about Polly Delano's wool bedcover here:

http://www.samuelherrup.com/antique_textiles/embroidered_wool_bed_cover/embroidered_wool_bed_cover.html

Imported Prints: Rococo

2012-02-26T06:00:00.001-06:00

Above: two rococo prints as quilt borders

Watching Downton Abbey occasionally inspires me to toss out the American walnut pie safe and buy a Rococo Revival armoire. It's highly unlikely---but I have been noticing more Rococo design in antique fabrics.

The Drawing Room at the real castle

was decorated in the 19th century,

an example of Rococo revival.

The footed vase is a staple of rococo design

Rococo (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable) is a style of European decoration---high fashion in the 18th century there and lagging behind a few decades here. It's characterized by a plethora of pattern---layers of decorated surfaces, in particular shell-like shapes. The word Rococo, applied in the 19th century when the revivals began, is thought be a combination of French and Italian from the French rocaille for stones and coquilles for shell, a play on the word Baroque.

My grandmother loved this look. (Probably why I collect plain walnut pie cupboards.) William Morris was not fond of it either.

Characteristics include the scroll, the s-curve, the double s-curve, trailing ribbons, gold leaf, the illusion of net and the cartouche...

Cartouche- a scrolling frame

Cartouches & Baskets

Many of the furnishing-scale prints, the chintzes, of the 1800-1820 era show rococo influence.

Above are two small scraps from a quilt finished in the year Britain's Princess Charlotte died, 1817. The quilt was shown at the New England Quilt Museum last summer.

Wallpaper?

If you want a good stash of early prints look for cartouches, scrolls,

Nets

and curves.

Rococo detail is not a good clue to date since it's been revived so many times.

But it is a definite look in early 19th century chintzes

This John Hewson vase printed in Philadelphia

about 1800 shows a European rococo influence.

So where are you going to find rococo repros? The look is popular in decorating weight prints

and check out Kaari Meng's Paniers des Fleurs for French General and Moda.

The irony in the old quilts---in case you haven't noticed it---is the combination of the over-the-top rococo prints with simple and direct patchwork.

A quilt probably from the 1840s

with a border chintz in courtly Rococo style

and blocks in Germanic folk art style

Imported Prints: Indiennes & Mignonettes

2012-02-21T06:00:00.004-06:00

The madder red print is a small, simple figure repeated in a staggered or half-drop repeat. One description for this style is an Indienne. The one above looks like a woodblock with a background of picotage (tiny dots) but it may be a roller print. I am guessing early 19th century.

Another Indienne in blue on white

Western textile manufacturers learned much of their natural dye technology from Indian artisans. They also appropriated design, adapting floral chintzes to large-scale furnishing fabrics and borrowing images for smaller-scale dress prints that also found their ways into quilts. In France exotic designs inspired by Indian textiles were called Perses or Indiennes (French for Persian or Indian.)

The blue and white print from a British quilt about 1800 could be classified as a mignonette or Indienne

An Indian style print in two colorways

from an 1820s swatchbook

with a scattered floral at the top---

less Indian, more European in design.

One of the most enduring cultural exchanges is what we call Paisley pattern, composed of cone-shaped figures--- an oval shape with a curl on the end. The image is traditionally known as a botha or boteh, from the Hindi word buta for flower.

A selection of Indiennes or shawl prints

from about 1800-1840.

Sharp geometric edges in printed figures echo a woven figure.

Other imitations of Indian design were called shawl prints or cashmere designs, cotton prints that imitated more expensive woven figures by adding horizontal or diagonal lines across the figure. Figures in shawl prints often had squared-off edges to give the look of a geometric woven pattern.

A floral and a boteh---

new blocks for printing---imagery hasn't changed

In France the tiny figures were also known as mignonettes, a French word that can be translated as "little fancies" or "miniatures." Like Indian design, mignonettes were loose abstractions of floral forms.

A new Indian print.

India prints remain popular for interior design:

bedding and tableware

This new bedsheet echoes the multicolored prints and diagonal repeat so popular in the 18th century.

Here's a reproduction Indienne from my Lately Arrived from London collection:

The Ship Surprise

The original Indiennes were block printed in India but by 1800 English and French factories were copying them in abundance. Once roller printing became the dominant technique in the teens more complex prints in Indienne style became possible.

Here is a page from the London magazine Ackermann's Repository, the September, 1812 issue. These periodicals had a page each issue with fabric tipped in (glued in to them.) The fabric glued into the spoke at 1:00 above is very similar to my reproduction print, described as "a sea weed ground printed (cotton) cambric so evidently calculated for the humble order of morning and domestic wear."

Turkey red print from about 1840

We see many multicolored calicoes in this style in the 1810s and '20s as printers increased their color skills. Indiennes achieved their greatest popularity with American quilters after 1840 when Turkey red prints in mignonette style became quite popular for applique and friendship quilts.

See more about these later prints at this blogpost

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/12/document-and-reproduction-prints.html

See some early Indiennes from India (printed and embroidered) at the Victoria and Albert Museum website. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74009/robe/
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O77745/textile/
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O153365/textile/
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O148308/textile/
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O63176/textile/

Several of these pictures are from the online dealer Moraine-le-Fay. Click here:

http://morgaine-le-fay.co.uk/?page_id=9

And see Amanda's very useful collection of Ackermann's Allegorical Woodcuts (the page with the swatches) from 1812 here:

http://30thbash.blogspot.com/2011/09/ackermans-repository-fabric-swatches_11.html

Here's a page of fashion from Ackermann's from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=link;dtype=i;key=157109;page=801900101

Bird Prints: Reproductions

2012-02-14T06:00:00.010-06:00

Reproduction quilt top by Claire McKarns

Claire framed a pheasant toile with pieced triangles and mitered a madder-style stripe.

Bird prints were so popular with quilters during the 1810-1840 period that reproduction stashes require them, but they are hard to find in quilt-weight fabric. Here are a few you might have in your chintz cupboard.

Jo Morton's 2010 reproduction of a "Bird Chintz" with a dark ground.

And a very accurate Drab or Quercitron yellow ground.

Read Jo's Journal entry on this print and its document here:

http://web.me.com/jomorton/Jo_Blog/Jos_Journal/Entries/2010/1/25_Bird_Chintz.html

Harriet Hargrave reproduced pheasants and a plum tree in her Birds & Basics line a few years ago.

See Kimberley Wulfert's post on this line with a review of the literature on the bird chintzes:

http://www.antiquequiltdating.com/Birds_and_Basics.html

You can always find birds chintzes in decorator-weight fabric like this one, which has a great bird for Broderie Perse. The background is too red to be an accurate reproduction but those birds isolated would look pretty good.

It's easier to find bird prints as single-color toile reproductions.

Toile from the back of a quilt about 1830-1850.

The toile is probably 1800-1820.

Terry Thompson and I reproduced the toile above about a dozen years ago for our first Moda reproduction collection called Floral Trails. Surprisingly, I found some still available on line.

http://www.bstmarket.com/fabric/floral_trails.htm

The tan colorway

Kaye England has a nice chintz out in English Lane. She has done some great bird repros over the years.

Including this bird of paradise which Georgann Eglinski used in her reproduction of a quilt shown in a book by Robert Bishop years ago.

Georgann Eglinski, Thank You, Robert Bishop

The turkey fabric that Georgann used in this strip quilt is also from Kaye---quite a while ago.

Georgann Eglinski, Turkey Red, Turkey Blue

I also remember a good bird chintz in a Fons and Porter line many years ago. I guess that's why we keep a stash. You'll find a use for it someday.

You may have to use a heavier weight decorating fabric to find good bird toiles.

Here's a miniature with a bird toile from an Etsy store by Annette Plog

http://www.etsy.com/listing/70267328/bird-toile-medallion-petit-quilt

Bird Prints: Antiques

2012-02-07T06:00:00.009-06:00

Pheasants, grouse and other gamebirds were the rage in chintz in the early 19th century as in this multicolored print, probably done in a combination of roller printing with wood block additions of the brown background and the blues. There once might have been a yellow printed over some of the blues to make green leaves.

The birds's long tails are often echoed in palm fronds in the trees. Accuracy in depicting birds, trees and ecosystems was not a priority. English pheasants in tropical forests were common. This print looks to have a block-printed ground in a plum or chocolate color with the usual roller printed detail in madder reds.

Blue added---again there might have once been a yellow now faded away.

Jeremy Adamson in the Calico and Chintz catalog attributes the print above to "ca 1825-35," but for the style as a whole we use a broader date of 1810-1835.

Textile snobs (at the time and later) dismissed many of the bird chintzes with words like "dumped," "flooded" and "inferior." The mills rushing to produce the popular designs cobbled together some imagery, flooded the market and dumped the yardage on their overseas trading partners, who were undboutedly thrilled to get them. One cannot deny the gracelessness in some of prints.

A strip quilt that shows the short repeat on these English prints, indicating they are roller prints rather than the larger repeats one would see in plate prints. Note the repeat from the end of the bird's tail to the end of the next bird's tail.

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/10014411?rpp=40&pg=1&ft=*&what=Quilts&pos=13

See another bird print from 1816 in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum here:

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O34159/furnishing-demy-chintz/

Enjoy this tree of life chintz quilt growing in a forest of tiny palm trees in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by clicking here:

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/59060.html?mulR=28

Similar trees in a quilt dated 1833 in the collection of the Charleston Museum of Art:

http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/mobile/textilesgallery.html#label1-11

Check out their online exhibit of "Botanical Quilts" here:

http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/mobile/textilesgallery.html#page1

Tails went to dramatic lengths

See this quilt (#2007.034.0001) in the collection of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum by clicking here:

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/343f4330-187d-47fa-acb5-1d5b96a82761.jpg

And see a similar English quilt in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum by clicking here
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O165071/bed-cover/

There has been some discussion that English quilters did not use these prints but several English quilts survive with yardage and patches.

including this rather palm-like tree in the Austen family quilt.

And this antique in the collection of a very lucky blogger here:

http://prickyourfinger.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-bedspread.html

Here's a later print: Exotic birds remain popular in chintzes and toiles for decorating.

6 Sarah Smith Emery: Smuggling English Cottons

2012-02-01T06:00:00.006-06:00

A View of Newburyport in 1835

Sarah Emery (1787-1879) of Newburyport, Massachusetts, had been married a little over a year when the war began. Her husband owned a tavern---combination hotel, restaurant and bar in the town on the Merrimack River.

Few in that area with an economy based on international shipping profited during the war or the earlier embargoes, but David Emery’s tavern prospered once the war began. High unemployment allowed customers more time and more reason to drink. Most important--- the tavern was situated on a road used by smugglers.

A nostalgic look at "the carrying trade," as roads replaced waterways.

“We could not have engaged in a more lucrative business,“ she wrote in her memoirs. “British manufacturers having quantities of goods upon their hands, ran cargo after cargo into their eastern provinces [in Canada], thence they were passed across the border and taken South [to Boston] by ox teams; as our accommodations were excellent, the teamsters made ‘Emery's tavern’ their headquarters.”

She recalled a steady stream of drovers throughout the War.

“At sunset I have often counted a dozen or fifteen drawn up by the sidewalk, opposite the long barn, their motley coverings of patchwork quilts, coverlets etc., presenting a gypsy-like, semi-barbarous appearance.” Under the quilts covering the ox-carts were the luxuries New Englanders were not producing. Sarah listed them: flour, sugar and molasses, gloves, muslins, laces, ribbons, crockery and glass.

British china in America

“All imported goods commanded an exorbitant price. Flour rose to fifteen and eighteen dollars per barrel, brown sugar was twenty-five cents a pound…. I paid a dollar a yard for calico.” She remembered one shipment in particular, a load of cotton prints and shawls. Soon the young Emerys were smugglers themselves.

A Massachusetts tavern keeper could hope to look as fashionable

as this French woman in a white paisley shawl with a high-colored border---

a painting from 1810 by Francois Henri Mullard

“The shawls were quite pretty, having white or buff centres and high-colored borders; they sold for four dollars apiece. I took calico for a dress and a shawl; two other shawls were sold in the house; the remainder of the goods were slyly conveyed in the evening to the store of Miss Dolly Carnes. This new stock brought a rush of custom to that spinster's establishment… Shawls were in great demand.”

So much trade went through Newburyport that it had a custom house, this one built in 1835.

Sarah entertained the customs inspectors while the men loaded smuggled goods.

One night a knock at the door: “Mr. Emery hastily dressed, when it was found that Capt. Bartlett had a stagecoach at the door, filled with merchandise… These were hastily placed in my best bedroom, from whence they were gradually taken to the stores in town. Capt. Bartlett continued to bring goods for some time. We often had bales of valuable cloth hidden in the hay mow.”

Bales of imported cloth....

Maybe we should be checking the barns around Newburyport

While David drove the goods to warehouses Sarah entertained the customs officials in the tavern. Everyone was in on the plot. Her other job was to keep the rest of the tavern customers from giving in to an “unseemly outburst of merriment.”

Sarah’s memoirs were published in 1879 and were actually written by her daughter Sarah Anna Emery, a novelist who probably embellished the tales. (Were patchwork quilts so commonplace they could be used as wagon covers?) In The Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian Sarah Anna explains:

"This volume, as its title implies, has been chiefly derived from the recollections of my mother; but recitals by my father, grandparents and other deceased relatives and friends have aided the work, and I have obtained many anecdotes and facts from several aged persons still living… My desire has been to give a graphic history of 'Ye Olden Time'…”

Newburyport a century after the War of 1812

Yet Sarah's memoirs of ye olden time give us enough detail to realize how imported cottons, barred by embargoes, got into the eager hands of American quilters. Smuggling went on up and down the Atlantic coast and across the Canadian border. As diarist Minister William Bentley of Salem wrote in 1813: "The public mind much interested in the schemes of smuggling." He described one modus operandi. An American vessel meets at sea an English ship, which has agreed to be a "prize," a captured ship brought to shore with its goods declared forfeit. "We are already the greatest adepts at smuggling in the Universe."

Variations of these "palm trees and gamebirds" printed in England were popular with Americans

We see many variations. Jeremy Adams in the catalog Calico & Chintz summarizes the dating of these prints: "From about 1814 to 1816 and during the decade 1825-1835, designs containing exotic and game birds were popular patterns on English chintz."

We see them as borders, as wholecloth quilts and as cut-out chintz applique.

Quilt by Violet Elizabeth Alexander, Charlotte, North Carolina, Date-inscribed 1830, Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

Read more about Violet's quilt by clicking here:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&gkey=169&objkey=9567

Center of a North Carolina quilt by Cynthia Clementine Johnston.

See the whole quilt and more information at the Quilt Index:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4B-82-495

The fabric seems to have been printed in England, much of it at the printworks known as Bannister Hall in the teens, and used in quilts here from about 1810 to 1860.

In February we'll consider English prints---the bales of imported cloth in Sarah Smith Emery's hay mow.

Read The Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian here at Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=RQbHOrNqDhsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

British?

And if you want to read a day-by-day account of life for a bachelor minister in Salem during the war see The Diary of William Bentley, volume IV (Salem: The Essex Institute, 1914)

Swag Borders

2012-01-28T06:00:00.007-06:00

Cut-out chintz quilt by Elizabeth Severson Emich

Photo copyright by the Maryland Historical Society.

I found this little-seen quilt in a Japanese catalog from the historical society.

The Baltimore Album Quilt Tradition: Maryland Historical Society

Used copies are still available at a fairly reasonable price.

We've been discussing borders of simple shapes like the triangles along the edge in the above quilt but there was also a fashion for more complex swag borders as in the inner border.

Here's a sampler of a few from about 1810.

The swag borders are among the earliest applique designs that are not cut from chintz images---conventional applique.

This chintz quilt from the Smithsonian's collection includes everything: swags with bowknot ties of conventional applique and a few cut-out chintz flowers.

Our critical eyes prefer more perfection in the swag shapes.

It seems that many of these quilters hadn't much of a template to go by.

The sources for the design idea are obvious.

Sheraton's suggestions for cornices

Swags and bowknots were everywhere in

classical imagery and federal architecture.

1781 Fashion Plate.

See the Martha Washington/Eliza Custis quilt in the last post for a swag fabric.

Border in an American quilt thought to be from the 1770s

in the American Museum in Bath, England, signed R. Porter

Vintage Rose

Judy Severson's updated interpretation of a swag border,

graceful arcs tacked down by roses.

Here's a sketch of a basic swag I did for a quilt a few years ago.

Print it so the dotted line is 6" long.

Ann's Legacy: A Tribute to Ann Daggs by Di Ford

If you'd like a "real" pattern for a period swag here's Di Ford's interpretation of the Ann Daggs (Dagge) quilt in the Smithsonian. Buy the pattern here:

http://www.threadbear.com.au/online-store/category/view/29

See some antique quilts with swag borders:

Margaret Nichols's Tree of Life in the Winterthur Museum collection:

http://content.winterthur.org:2011/cdm/singleitem/collection/quilts/id/340/rec/1

A faded example with an inner swag border in Michigan State University's museum from the Quilt Index:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1E-3D-24

And one dated 1809 by Eliza Thompson from the International Quilt Study Center & Museum (#1997.007.0257)

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/5d76f7b8-3e7f-4b75-8f75-b4089957f066.jpg

Two-Generation Quilt

2012-01-25T06:00:00.005-06:00

"This Quilt was entirely the work of my grandmother

as far as the plain borders. I finished it in 1815

and leave it to my Rosebud. E. P. Custis."

This note is attached to the Washington/Custis quilt in the Smithsonian's collection. Rosebud was Eliza Parke Custis's daughter, also Eliza.

Quilt top begun by Martha Dandridge Custis Washington

and finished by her granddaughter Eliza Parke Custis,

about 1780 to 1815.

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Martha started it, perhaps in the 1780s, and she left it unfinished at her death in 1802. Her granddaughter Eliza finished the top in 1815, so it spans our time period.

Plan for a 104" x 104" square quilt

Center = 24" x 24"
Seven Borders

A = 5" Plain striped fabric with brown cornerstones
B = 3" Plain pinkish fabric with brown cornerstones
C = 6" Appliqued with circles and ovals
D = 6" Pieced of striped fabrics
E = 7" Plain foulard print with circles in cornerstones
F = 6" Mitered swag print
G = 7" Mitered foulard print

The Center Square Finishes to 24" x 24"

Begin with a central field of circles finishing to 12" square. (Martha loved circles!)

She appliqued hers, so you need four dark circles finishing to 3" and 1 full medium brown circle plus 4 half circles and 4 quarter circles. Applique these to a background cut 12-1/2" x 12-1/2"

You could also piece these circles, which is how I drew the central focus in EQ7.

Here's the block which has to finish to 3 inches.

Click on this picture; print it at 3" square.

Framing the Central Field (This isn't the same proportions as Martha's but the math is easier)

The first dark frame 1 finishes to 1" wide and 14" square.
Cut 2 dark strips 1-1/2" x 12-1/2" and 2 dark strips 1-1/2" x14-1/2".
And 4 medium corner squares 1-1/2" x 1-1/2".

The second light frame finishes to 1-1/2" wide and 17" square.
Cut 2 light strips 2" x 14" and and 2 light strips 2" x 17-1/2"

For the corner triangles cut squares 6-7/8" x 6-7/8"
Cut 2 brown and 6 pink squares and cut in half diagonally to make 4 brown and 12 pink triangles

Border A---5"

For Border A framing the central patchwork Martha used a stripe left over from one of her dresses. Martha loved stripes.

It seems to be a brown serpentine stripe with another stripe of dots printed across it.

Find a stripe and cut

4 strips 5-1/2" x 24-1/2"
4 medium brown print cornerstones 5-1/2" x 5-1/2"

With this border the top should finish to 34".

Border B---3"

This plain border is pieced of a pink and white stripe with a little floral trail across it.

Cut 4 strips 3-1/2" x 34-1/2".
Cut 4 medium brown cornerstones 3-1/2" x 3-1/2".

With this border the top should finish to 40".

Border C---6"

Border C is plain white cotton with appliqued circles and ovals. This border finishes to 6" so cut 12 circles finishing to 4". Then cut 4 oval shapes from a toile to feature an image. These ovals should be about 4" tall by 5" wide.

Applique these to 4 white strips and cornerstones.

Cut 4 strips 6-1/2" x 40-1/2".
And 4 cornerstones 6-1/2" x 6-1/2".

With this border the top should finish to 52".

Border D---6"

Border D is pieced of rectangles cut from stripes and each border has a pieced block in the center. At 6" I've made this border narrower than Martha's.

This block is also the basic structure of the center of the quilt. I haven't seen a published name for the block so I think we should call it "Lady Washington's Favorite" (I'm drawing it in as number 2403.5 in my copy of the Encylcopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns.)
Martha pieced the blocks out of two different stripes and one small print. You might want to use a little more contrast and a little less stripe.

For each of the 6" finished blocks (Do this 4 times)

Center square: cut a striped fabric 4-3/4"
Corners: Cut 2 dark and 6 medium dark squares 2-3/8". Cut each in half with a single diagonal cut. You need 4 dark and 12 medium dark triangles.

You then need to piece these blocks into a border. Each border strip should finish to 52". You have 23" on either side of the squares so you'll need two rectangles to fill this area. Note how Martha used stripes.

Cut 8 rectangles for the ends 6-1/2" x 10-1/2".
Cut 8 rectangles 6-1/2" x 13-1/2"
For the cornerstones cut 4 squares 6-1/2" x 6-1/2".
With this border the top should finish to 64".

Border E---7"

This is a plain border of a dark foulard print (diagonally set figure) with appliqued striped circles in the cornerstones.

Cut 4 strips 7-1/2" x 64-1/2".
Cut 4 white squares 7-1/2" x 7-1/2" for the cornerstones.
Cut 4 circles finishing to 5" to applique.
With this border the top should finish to 78".

Border F---6"

This Quilt was entirely the work of my grandmother

as far as the plain borders. I finished it...

I am guessing Eliza added Borders F and G. This one is mitered rather than finished with square cornerstones.

For F find a gorgeous swag printed chintz or toile. You need 2-2/3 yards.

Cut 4 strips 6-1/2" x 90-1/2"
With this border the top should finish to 90".

Border G---7"

The final border is another dark foulard print (3 yards).

Cut 2 strips 7-1/2" x 90-1/2" for the sides.
Cut 2 strips 7-1/2" x 104-1/2" for the top and bottom.
With this border the top should finish to 104".

I hope the math is right. If you think I have miscalculated let me know.

A Border of Circles

2012-01-21T06:00:00.022-06:00

We've looked at basic borders of chained squares and zig-zag lines, both simple, both popular with early medallion makers.

Detail of a medallion by Sophia Coltrane.

North Carolina quilt project

Here's another basic design---dots or appliqued circles.

Not very popular. And in fact kind of quirky.

I've only kept track of them because I noticed them on two Washington family quilts.

Quilt top begun by Martha Dandridge Custis Washington

and finished by her granddaughter Eliza Parke Custis,

about 1780 to 1815.

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

I don't think the dots are going to start a craze but just in case I'll post an outline for a medallion like Martha's and Eliza's above in the next post.

Quilt top attributed to Martha Washington

in the collection of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association

For more dots:

See Sophia Coltrane's quilt, attributed to Randolph County, North Carolina on the Quilt Index by clicking here:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4B-82-458

And see the quilt in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (#53.1070) by clicking here:

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/pieced-quilt-112601

Chain of Squares Borders

2012-01-14T06:00:00.077-06:00

Medallion dated 1804 by Mary Stites in Pennsylvania,

pictured in Nancy and Donald Roan's Lest I Shall Be Forgotten.

Mary's full-size quilt is elegant in its simplicty and proportions. The chain of squares in the final pieced border is a pattern often seen in early medallions. It's simple and bold without the detail seen in later medallions.

Cynthia Collier made a wall-size reproduction using a pattern in my book

America's Printed Fabrics 1770-1890

This medallion by Mary Eby dated 1803 is the earliest quilt documented by the Maryland project. See it in their book A Maryland Album by Gloria Seaman Allen and Nancy Gibson Tuckhorn.

Here's a vintage top from Penny McMorris's collection with the same kind of final pieced border pulling the compositon together. See Diane's interpretation of this quilt at Persnickety Quilts

http://persnicketyquilts.blogspot.com/search/label/medallion%20quilt

A reproduction by Georgann Eglinski framing an antique Japanese textile with the final border of chained squares dark on one side, light on the other- a little more sophisticated variation.

Bobbi Finley & Carol Gilham Jones, a collaborative reproduction, 2006.

Bobbi framed the panel with stars and did the zigzag. Carol did the border of squares and the outer stars. Notice that some of Carol's squares are plain squares and others are four-patches in that random way quilters used to compose.

Sylvia Jennings Galbraith

Medallion Doll Quilt, 2001

Click here to see more about this border in Martha Washington's Penn's Treaty Quilt:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/10/five-popular-blocks-for-marthas-quilt.html

Here are some links to antique quilts with chained square borders.

From the collection of Michigan State University:
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1E-3D-11

A stuffed-work quilt from the DAR Museum
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-136

A chintz quilt from the International Quilt Study Center and Museum # 2008.040.0182
http://cdn.firespring.com/images/236e86da-966e-4d13-9693-ea7cd6f768d9.jpg

From the D.A.R. Museum a Hewson quilt with a border that is actually a strip
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-2C

Of course, the border makes a great strip quilt too

Reproduction by Georgann Eglinski

Zig-Zag Borders

2012-01-07T06:00:00.006-06:00

Medallion dated 1804 from an online auction

In January the topic is various patchwork borders, beginning with what we'd call a zig-zag or streak-of-lightning border

Crib quilt from an online auction

Medallion by Jane Gatewood from the Quilt Index

This quilt dated 1796 has two zig-zag variations framing the center applique.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=50-8A-106F

"Maryland, Math and a Magnifying Glass"

Reproduction wall-size quilt by Sylvia Jennings Galbraith made for an American Quilt Study Group challenge a few years ago---Bedcovers Before 1840.

Sylvia writes that she interpreted a quilt from Stella Rubin's book : (Miller's)Treasure or Not? How to Compare & Value American Quilts, pg. 41, listed as "Stipple Quilt, Maryland c.1820". The original was from the collection of Eve Wilson/photographs Stella Rubin.

"Since it is a small photo, I had to use a magnifying glass to see the fabrics. Coincidentally, the day I was basting it, my copy of The Quilted Planet by Celia Eddy arrived, with a full page photo of the same quilt ....
My quilt is a version of the center section-there are several more irregular borders or frames outward from this."

Below are some ways to get the effect of that zig-zag border...

I found four free patterns online with zig-zag variations. Here's one using the stacked flying geese idea.

From the Blooming Workshop

A while ago Anita posted an online "quilt along" patterning an English quilt belonging to Cindy Vermillion Hamilton. Click here:

http://bloominworkshop.wordpress.com/medallion-quilt-along/

And see a Flickr group with more pictures

http://www.flickr.com/groups/742566@N20/pool/10303685@N06/

The Virginia Quilt Museum Medallion by Mariann Simmons

Mariann Simmons, in cooperation with the Virginia Quilt Museum, has drafted a free pattern for their medallion. Download the PDF for the pattern here

http://www.quiltingtreasures.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/92cd7749c996d8093df08d4a93027a06/download/old_virginia_calicos.pdf

And see more pictures of the model here

http://collectorwithaneedle.blogspot.com/2011/05/virginia-medallion-c-1840-medallion.html

They do the border with strips and triangles.

Hartfield Medallion by me and Moda

Moda still has the pattern for this quilt up there although this Jane-Austen-era fabric is long gone.

Click here for the PDF.

http://www.unitednotions.com/fp_hartfield.pdf

We used the stacked flying geese method.

Faith by Howard Marcus for Moda

And the pattern for the medallion Faith for Collections for a Cause uses strips and triangles. http://www.unitednotions.com/fp_cfac-faith.pdf

5 Mary Telfair: I Only Wish I Was a Man

2012-01-01T06:00:00.010-06:00

We Americans who learned our history in the U.S. are surprised to find how quickly the States set their sights on Canadian conquest in 1812. “ Free Trade and Sailors' Rights” may have been the motto on the flags and china pitchers but Congressional “War Hawks” saw an opportunity for northern expansion. British minister Augustus John Foster compared the land grab by the young U.S. to the necessity of “a duel to a young officer.”

Henry Clay in 1811, an up-and-coming

34-year-old Congressman from Kentucky

Many War Hawks, headed by Henry Clay, agreed with former President Jefferson that taking the Canadian Protectorate from the British would be “a mere matter of marching” because England, busy with Napoleon, would not actually protect it and the Canadians, many former U.S. Colonials, would welcome annexation. State militia and the small regular Army marched north to the Great Lakes with ambitious plans to take Montreal, the Niagara region and western outposts in today’s Ontario.

General William Hull crossed the Detroit River southeast into Canada but was bluffed into believing the British and Native troops outnumbered the Americans. Do note that the U.S. is north.

The western front was the first strategy to fail as the British drove U.S. troops back over the border into the Michigan Territory and captured Fort Detroit and the adjacent town.

Newspapers second guessed the Army

Unable to believe their arrogant plan had flaws, Congress and the press blamed Detroit’s surrender on Detroit's defender, General of the Army of the Northwest William Hull.

The generation gap between William Hull born in 1753 and Henry Clay

born in 1777 is quite apparent in their hair fashions.

Powdered wigs were old-fashioned in 1812 (but still worn.)

Hull was court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to a firing squad. Only President Madison's intervention saved his life---if not his reputation.

Fort Detroit, a 4-pointed star

Detroit’s shocking loss created War Hawks in unlikely places. Mary Telfair in Georgia wrote a friend she was distracted by war news. “My mind has been wholly engrossed with needle work and inventing little trifles by way of amusement.” She read nothing but newspapers. “My heart throbs with joy whenever I discover a successful action of the Americans…[to contrast] with the inglorious surrender in Canada which has cast such a stigma on the American character which nothing but a conquest of that country can retrieve….I only wish I was a man…”

Mary Telfair (1791-1875)

This beautiful miniature portrait by Enrichetta Narducci

was painted on a piece of ivory less than 3"

with gouache (a tempera) in 1842

when Mary was 51 years old.

Collection of Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah.

Mary Telfair, 21 years old when the War began, left legacies to Savannah for body and soul. At her death she donated the family mansion built in 1819 as a museum .

The Telfair Museum of Art remains the cultural heart of the city.

The Telfair Hospital for Females was another gift to Savannah.

In the Telfair Museum collection is the oldest documented Georgia quilt yet found, a post-war tree-of-life chintz quilt dated 1824 by Mary Elizabeth Taylor. We know from her writing that Mary Telfair did much needlework herself, but find no quilts by her in the record.

Medallion quilters favored several pieced border designs, which we shall consider in January, the first being that zig-zag or fence rail border that Mary Taylor repeated---one we also see in Zebiah Hewson's Philadelpia quilt.

This border seems to echo the fashion for appliqued Vandyke triangles.

Above and below the zig-zag border in a pieced medallion from an online auction.

The quilt probably dates to the 1820-40 period.

There are several ways to piece this border.

It can have sharp points as in the quilt above.

Or blunt points as in this detail from a quilt in the

collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See the whole quilt by clicking here:

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/pieced-quilt-112601

You can make the zig-zags light or dark---early quiltmakers were fond of white lines in a calico background.

Above and below, British quilts from the 1830s and '40s

showing the persistence of the design with medallion makers

on the other side of the Atlantic.

The border seems to have evolved into a strip quilt design---

this one probably first quarter of the 19th century.

You can read Mary Telfair's letters to her friend:
Mary Telfair to Mary Few: Selected Letters, 1802-1844,(Betty Wood, ed., (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007)

Read more about Mary Elizabeth Taylor's Georgia quilt in Georgia Quilts: Piecing together a history, Edited by Anita Zaleski Weinraub. You can buy it on sale from the University of Georgia Press.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/georgia_quilts

Great Lakes Seaway Trail Quilt Show

2011-12-30T06:00:00.005-06:00

A reminder that the 1812 Quilt Challenge sponsored by the Great Lakes Seaway Trail wants your 30" x 70" reproduction quilts done in 1812 style as entries in their event. Click here to see more about their timeline and the official form:

http://1812quiltchallenge.blogspot.com/2011/11/war-of-1812-quilt-challenge-timeline.html

A paper hat from the era

The deadline for registering your entry is now February 19th.

The quilts are due March 2nd.

Some knicknacks from the time....

Prince William on a pitcher

George Washington's horse

Desk from the Washington Benevolent Society dated 1812

Broderie Perse Evolves

2011-12-27T06:00:00.002-06:00

Chintz applique medallion dated 1837-1838 by Mrs. James Lusby

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

Cutting chintz images from one piece of fabric and stitching them to another was a technique that remained popular with Americans through the middle of the 19th century. Mrs. Lusby's quilt above has much in common with the Broderie Perse medallions made about 1810. Dogtooth applique and chintz borders frame a central floral. The major clue to date, had she not inscribed it, might be the Turkey red final border, a very popular fabric choice from about 1840 through the end of the century.

Another quilt from the Smithsonian collection with a basket holding the florals.

Center with a lattice-work basket from an online auction

It is pirmarily the fabrics that help us date these cut-out-chintz medallions as style changed so little.

Again, an emphasis on Turkey red, a fabric rather rare in 1815, dates this quilt to after 1840.

The maker combined the new fashion for conventional applique in the Germanic primary colors with the now old-fashioned cut-out chintz.

Another open-work basket medallion, hard to date from just a photo in an online auction. These baskets and containers seem to have replaced tree-of-life compositions as the century wore on, but you don't want to really use that as a clue to a later date since these quilts are all so similar. If you wanted to put a basket or a cornucopia as a container in an 1812 reproduction quilt you could make a case for it.

The one thing you don't want to do is make a block-style Broderie Perse quilt.

Like this one from the Proudfoot family in the collection of the Smithsonian.

I know it's tempting. Blocks are so portable.

But it would be like wearing a bustle to Dolley Madison's Wednesday night squeeze.

Irish Chain with Broderie Perse

from Laura Fisher's collection

It's an idea whose time hasn't yet arrived.

Blocks and Broderie Perse---about 1840.

Palampores and the Tree of Life

2011-12-21T06:00:00.001-06:00

Detail of a Broderie Perse or cut-out chintz quilt from an online auction.

The imagery in early chintz applique quilts has a long history in Europe and Asia.

Indian palampore on the left; applique quilt on the right.

Parallels are quite obvious between the quilts and the hand-painted and block-printed Indian chintz that had been popular bedcoverings with earlier generations of well-to-do Europeans. The idea of a magical tree bearing a multitude of flowers and fruits is a Biblical reference that inspired embroidery and other arts for centuries. Melinda Watt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art website quotes a mid-17th century poem about an English needlewoman:
'Twixt Art and Nature: Trees of fruits
With leaves, boughs, branches, body, roots,
She made to grow in Winter time,
Ripe to the eye, easy to climb.

Detail of a 17th-century English embroidery

from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/64.101.1305

Tree-of-life imagery is also found in Asian and Indian cultures. Palampores made for the European export market combined the common threads. The word palampore has roots in the word for bedcovering. Most of the Indian spreads we see were designed to please western tastes, a combination of cultural imagery that remained popular with early 19th-century appliqué artists.

Palampore from the Ismail Merchant collection,

Sold at Christies in 2009

Links to more palampores, some quilted, some not:

The photo of this 18th-century palampore from the Winterthur Museum allows you to see the details

http://content.winterthur.org:2011/cdm/singleitem/collection/quilts/id/357

From the New Jersey project and the Quilt Index

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4A-7F-F28

From the International Quilt Study Center and Museum, #2008.040.0219

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/35b1487b-8e30-43dc-98b9-b20c3f8cd624.jpg

The Powerhouse Museum gives you more information on the palampore in general.

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=196121&img=126150

The Royal Ontario Museum has posted a video showing conservation of a palampore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrSIC2fra6A

If you haven't seen enough go to the search page for the Victoria and Albert Museum and type in the word palampore in the search box.

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/

Detail of Tree of Life painting

Gustav Klimt, about 1909

From the digital Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Watt, Melinda. "English Embroidery of the Late Tudor and Stuart Eras". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/broi/hd_broi.htm

Here's a post on the tree of life imagery in general: http://artpropelled.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Hewson Repros in Shops

2011-12-14T06:00:00.000-06:00

Just in time for the Bicentnennial of the War of 1812, Andover's John Hewson collection of reproductions has been shipped. Designer Kathy Hall showed the fabric and this quilt designed by Gail Kessler at spring market with expected summer delivery to shops.

Warehouses + Irene = Disaster

But there was a little problem.... Hurricane Irene flooded the warehouse. All that beautiful fabric--- wet, smelly, muddy and mildewed. They reprinted, which took a few months, and now it's ready.

Gail Kessler used the center, the other motifs and the borders to make this reproduction of the original spread in the collection of the Winterthur Museum that provided the inspiration.

Download a PDF with instructions for Gail's design by clicking here:
http://andoverfabrics.com/Quilts/Winterthur%20Museum%20John%20Hewson.pdf

And download one with instructions for Jean Ann Wright's here
http://andoverfabrics.com/Quilts/Winterthur%20John%20Hewson.pdf

I'm working on my reproduction of

Zebiah Smallwood Hewson's quilt beginning with the Andover center.

Zebiah's quilt top in the

Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/108224.html?mulR=25109|4

My interpretation

My central panel is smaller so my finished quilt will be smaller

(a good thing--- as Zeb's is 118" wide)

I've got the first dogtooth (Vandyke scallop) border done with 3" appliqued indigo stars in the corners.

Now I am thinking about the zig-zag. My center is square, although it doesn't look it here. With the first border it's 27". I think I will add a small white strip to make it finish to 30" so the math for the next border works out better.

Zebiah's version of the second border.

I think I will use this version of the design sketched out in EQ:

3" finished squares from Lately Arrived From London

Reproduction Tree of Life Medallions

2011-12-07T06:00:00.002-06:00

Tree of Life

Center

By Bobbi Finley

The tree-of-life is a classic compostion, an ancient tree sprouting flowers and leaves that could never co-exist in nature. Westerners adapted the idea from various Eastern imagery.

Bobbi's whole top on a windy day.

Tree of Life center by Judy Severson

The hillocks (range of hills) at the base are a tradition.

Tree of Life

By Cynthia Collier

Roseanne Smith

Broderie Perse Center

Exotic birds are an important addition.

Judy and Roseanne like butterflies too.

If you are looking for a pattern----

Banyan Tree Medallion by Margaret Mew for Quilt Station

http://www.quiltstation.com.au/?page_id=613

If you are inspired to cut your own see these posts on how to do it:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/07/more-on-broderie-perse.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2011/12/tree-of-life-reproduction.html

Judy Severson's work table

Roseanne Smith's new tree in progress

Almost finished

4: Ann Randolph Morris: Virginia to New York

2011-12-01T06:01:00.007-06:00

A collage of Ann Cary Randolph Morris (1774-1837)

and a late 19th-century piece of cut-out-chintz applique

"Mr. Madison's War" had strong opposition, primarily from members of the Federalist party who blamed Madison's Democratic-Republicans for diplomatic failure. The Federalist party of ex-President John Adams was centered in the north, led by several Founding Fathers who'd invented the Revolution. New York's Gouverneur Morris, a younger member of the older generation, had been a primary author of the Constitution. Gouverneur (it was his mother's family name) had a strong voice in the anti-war movement, calling it a "wicked war of conquest...a moral wrong."

Gouverneur Morris about the time

he was a minister to the French court before the French Revolution

Sixty years old in 1812, he'd inherited the 2,000 acre family fiefdom called Morrisania in what is now the South Bronx. A bachelor bon vivant until late in life, he spent the early 1810s developing the canal system linking New York City to the Great Lakes. Private life trumped politics during the War. In 1813 his 39-year-old wife Ann Cary Randolph (Nancy) gave birth to Morrisania's heir and the following year her family and his plunged them into a public scandal with allegations that Gouverneur II was perhaps not of Morris blood, his mother a promiscuous murderess, his peg-legged father a cuckolded old man.

Morrisania north of New York City,

an estate worth fighting about

America remained enough like England to provide this plot for an Austen novel. The extended Morris family had counted on inheriting from the bachelor squire. Late love, marriage and a young family were not in their plans.

The house overlooking Long Island Sound

Nephews gave the baby a pseudo-Russian nickname "Cuttusoff" but snide family jokes were not enough to disinherit. They had an ally in Nancy's famous cousin John Randolph of Roanoke, a Virginia Congressman temporarily out of office due to his anti-war oratory. Randolph was a 19th-century combination of William F. Buckley and Truman Capote, a mesmerizing speaker with an opium habit and vindictive streak. Like one of his muses Lord Byron, John Randolph was "mad, bad and dangerous to know." Nancy made the mistake of inviting him to Morrisania.

The Harlem River was a Morrisania boundary.

The High Bridge, an aqueduct, was begun in 1837,

the year before Nancy died.

Nancy had known him since childhood. Her Morris cousins included John's brothers Thomas, husband of Jefferson's daughter Martha, Richard who married Nancy's sister Judith, and Theodorick who impregnated Nancy before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. Eighteen-year-old Nancy suffered a miscarriage at a friend's, awakening the household with her screams. Scandal!!! An unwed, pregnant teenager from an aristocratic Virginia family---but things got worse.

Although a body was never found, the slaves whispered a baby had been murdered. A trial followed, called not by the state but by Nancy's brother-in-law Richard who hoped to put an end to rumors he was the father who had conspired with Nancy to kill the innocent evidence of their affair. He was acquitted but reputations were ruined. Then Richard died, leaving Nancy, John and Judith together at the plantation called Bizarre.

John Randolph in 1811

Painting by John Wesley Jarvis, National Portrait Gallery.

Whittier wrote a poem about his

"serpent hiss of scorning."

A decade later Nancy left Bizarre. Unmarriageable, penniless and alienated from the Randolphs, she sought work as a governess (It is just like Jane Austen!) in Newport, Rhode Island. Gouverneur Morris heard of her plight and invited her to be his housekeeper at Morrisania. Here the plot switches from Austen to Bronte. "Reader, she married him."

Nancy was housekeeper for a few months

before becoming mistress of the estate

John Randolph's letter-writing campaign against the Morrises began in late 1814. He accused Nancy not only of infanticide but of murdering Richard, of prostitution and of sex with the gardener (in this rendition the murdered infant was black). Nancy was a vampire who sucked "the best blood of my race...and struck her harpy fangs into an infirm old man."

Private battles were made public in open letters

Nancy parried with her own letters including one to the First Lady, Mrs. Madison. "I pray you to shew the enclosed [calling Randolph a 'malignant madman'] to every Virginian in Washington who possesses honor."

Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816)

Detail of a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Wait a minute, we digress. We were talking about Gouverneur Morris's opposition to the War of 1812. I know Nancy's troubles make a better story so I suggest you choose one of the books below to read more about it and I'll go on to quilts of the era.

I couldn't find any quilts attributed to the large Randolph family but the first style that comes to mind is Cut-Out-Chintz applique, in which images are trimmed from one piece of fabric and arranged on another, a technique popular in Virginia and the Chesapeake area in the early 19th century.

Cut-out-chintz quilts were also made in New England, New York and the Carolinas. The quilts pictured here might have been made in any of the United States (although we tend to see them originating in areas close to the Atlantic coast.) The style can represent Ann Randolph Morris, a Southern transplant in New York.

This cut-out chintz center was auctioned recently in London

but could be from the U.S.

Quilt attributed to the family of Thomas Hammond in Virginia

in the collection of the George Washington Foundation.

Click here to read more about this quilt.

http://www.kenmore.org/collections/textiles/quilt.html

The early examples often feature a central tree.

This one was published in Dr. Dunton's book Old Quilts

and said to have been date-inscribed 1807.

This one was auctioned in London, probably English.

Because American chintzes came through London we tend to believe the cut-out chintz style
originated in England, but the date-inscribed English versions aren't significantly earlier than
those in America.

The tree-of-life compositions reflect a fashion for "arborescent chintzes" (arbor= Latin for tree) that feature gnarly branches so popular in Indian and Chinese imagery and in Jacobean embroidery.

Arborescent chintzes printed in England were quite popular in America in the teens. Many pieces made it through the embargo. A tree-of-life center framed with dogtooth applique seems to be a typical early 19th-century design convention.

This lovely example was featured in the Folsom History Museum's annual Antique Quilt and Vintage Fashion Exhibit in the fall.

Click here for more: http://www.folsomhistorymuseum.org/

Another name for this applique style is Broderie Perse (French for Persian Embroidery).

I'll post more on cut-out-chintz as it was such an important early 19th century style. For more about Ann Cary Randolph Morris see these books.

Non-Fiction

Alan Pell Crawford, Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Cynthia A. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor & Reputation in Jefferson's America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution. Free Press

Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. Harper Collins, 2005

Phillip Hamilton, The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia. University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Fiction

Jay & Audrey Walz, The Bizarre Sisters. Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1950

Barbara Bentley, Mistress Nancy. McGraw Hill, 1980

The house at Bizarre burned to the ground in 1813.

John did not blame this misfortune on Nancy.

St Ann's in the Bronx was built by

Nancy and Gouverneur's son as a tribute to his mother's memory.

She and her husband are buried here.

Reproduction Embroidered Medallions

2011-11-20T06:00:00.008-06:00

Well I couldn't find any reproduction quilts with embroidered centers.

It's an OLD-OLD fashioned idea waiting to be revived.

So I'll show you a few more period embroidered centers, this one from dealer Cindy Rennels. It's signed "Sarah Simms 1814"

Like most of the other early embroidered quilts one would guess the

dated center is older than the actual quilt.

See Cindy's website here:

http://cindysantiquequilts.com/dynapage/PP19.htm

This one is from the collection of Old Sturbridge Village (#26-23-218),

made in New Hampshire.

Here's the link to the piece (I brightened the photos up a bit in Photoshop) You can see the pictures in high resolution at their site.

http://www.osv.org/common/image_viewer.php?ID=2623&M=400&TB=2

There are several embroidered panels, one that says

"Nancy Newton, Born February 18, 1801"

Notice the variety in her filled work stitches.

It's not too late to start a new trend. If you aren't comfortable drawing your own embroidered design you will find many kits for sale.

Like this one on linen from Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts

http://deerfield-ma.org/embroidery.htm#embroidery-2

If you want to learn about the stitches do a web search for crewel embroidery stitch or Jacobean embroidery stitch.

Here are two pages that offer help.

http://www.embroiderersguild.com/stitch/projects/crewel/crewel.html

http://www.needlenthread.com/2009/09/long-and-short-stitch-shading-lesson-6.html

More Embroidered Quilts and Bedcovers

2011-11-07T06:00:00.026-06:00

IQSC # 2006.014.001

Probably made in the United Kingdom.

Embroidery framed by piecework: a design option in 1812.

This bedcover is on display in the Elegant Geometry exhibit at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum right now. For an all-over view click here:

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/f8e4bd72-ee1d-4cea-8f3c-9782b8885234.jpg

"Sarah Woodhouse's

Work Dec 23

1799"

Center of a quilt offered by dealer Maureen Morris

Click here to see more in her online store:

http://www.maureenmorris.com/catalogue_category.asp?cat=Miscellaneous

One basic look in the early 19th century was simple print borders of what they might call "sprigged muslin" framing an embroided center. These quilts might be British or American as the style seems to have been popular on either side of the Atlantic. One guesses the format was a useful finish for an old piece of schoolgirl needlework, a reason there is often a discrepancy between the date on the embroidery and the age of the later cotton prints surrounding it.

Spreads with a print border framing old-fashioned embroidery

The 1800-1820 period with so much new technology in the textile world marked the beginning of fast-chainging fashion. But adding some chintz or patchwork to an embroidered piece could only bring it so far. The scattered floral designs above would have been unfashionable by 1810, indicating these might be older bedhangings adapted for coverlets. The print frames seem like an afterthought, an attempt to bring an old embroidered spread up-to-date.

"6 x 8 = 48 Dear Aunt, your quilt is out of date."

Lesson from Marmaduke Multiply in the 1830s

Of course, the embroidery took awhile to finish. Don't you just hate it when fashion changes and you aren't done yet.

Dated 1772

Scattered florals in Jacobean style, crewel work.

The height of fashion with an earlier generation

Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

These two marvelous spreads would look hopelessly old-fashioned by 1812.

The embroidered center in the IQSC quilt at the top is dated 1734.

The detail shows that the embroidery on all of these is what is called filled embroidery rather than the outline embroidery that became popular late in the 19th century.

See three embroidered spreads from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/10018308?rpp=20&pg=2&ft=embroidered+coverlet+mildred&pos=33

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/22.55

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/61.48.1

See the embroidered framed quilt at Jan Whitlock's online shop by clicking here and scrolling down to the bottom row.

http://www.janwhitlocktextiles.com/portfolio/textiles/

Martha Soule has two blue and white quilts in the Smithsonian

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=7224

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=7216

The blue and white with chintz border is in the Quilt Index. Click here:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4B-82-437

And more from the Quilt Index in the collection of the Museum of the Daughters of the American Revolution

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-1E:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-138

3 The Chevalier Sisters: War in the West

2011-11-01T06:00:00.008-05:00

An 1812 Battle in the Old Northwest

The French and the Native Tribes were important additional players in the British-American War of 1812. We have a hard time imagining the size of the early-19th-century Native American presence in the area known as the Old Northwest (Ohio to Wisconsin) because most tribes were forced further west in continuing Indian removals. Today's faded memory of that once-dominant culture is in the Indian names on rivers and towns.

Gallatin's map of the tribes near the Great Lakes

The early 19th-century tribes were certainly not a single power. Each had varying goals, economies and allegiances. England and Canada used diplomacy, threats, trade and tributes to ally Indians for their own purposes, policy that rankled Americans after the Revolutionary peace, another cause of hostilities leading to the 1812 War.

Francis Godfroy, a Miami-French trader

in a combination of Native and mainstream dress

The French remaining after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase also attempted to influence tribal allegiances. One remaining French presence was a population of Métis (people of mixed ancestry.) For generations Indian and French people intermarried, creating a unique culture that thrived along the waterways of Canada and the Midwestern states, as far west as Saint Louis and down to the Gulf of Mexico. The economy prospered on trade---furs and pelts exchanged for manufactured goods---with Métis acting as the go-betweens and translators.

The Chevalier sisters of Potawatomie and French descent were born in what we call Michigan in the 1780s. Archange Marie and Suzanne Françoise were daughters of a French trader and a Potawatomi woman who themselves were probably of mixed parentage.

The Ouilmette name lives on in Wilmette, Illinois.

Postcard from about 1920.

Archange Chevalier married Canadian Antoine Ouilmette in 1796 and settled near the mouth of the Chicago River at the southern edge of Lake Michigan (we call it Chicago) where Antoine worked for an American trader named John Kinzie. Suzanne, called Sheshi, married Louis Pierre Buisson, also a Canadian trader. Louis traveled from Peoria to Mackinac, often selling goods to Kinzie.

A mid-19th century interpetation of Fort Dearborn on the Chicago River

American Fort Dearborn protected Kinzie's trading post and the small lakefront village with a few Americans and Canadians of English descent living among mixed families. The French/Indian people tried to maintain peace and a make a profit by cooperating with the people of English descent and the Indians who resented American and British presence.

War shifted all allegiances. American commanders realized overtly hostile English influence over the local tribes made Fort Dearborn indefensible. Negotiating with Potawatomi elders, they traded a promise of American safe passage for goods stored at the Fort, "blankets, broadcloths, calicos, paints, etc.,"

The 1812 violence at Fort Dearborn

is remembered in a 1928 sculpture by Henry Hering,

built into the southwest tower of Chicago's Michigan Avenue Bridge.

Before leaving, the Army destroyed ammunition and liquor, a breach of promise according to younger Indians. Shortly after the Americans started out on August 15, 1812, violence exploded near Prairie Avenue at 18th in today's geography.

Women and children were fair game. Eighteen-year-old Margaret McKillip Helm survived only because Potawatomi leader Black Partridge pretended to drown her while supporting her head above the water. For reasons never explained he singled her out for protection, hiding her at Archange Ouilmette's house.

American Juliette Kinzie later wrote an account of Margaret's escape. Black Partridge advised her to "assume the ordinary dress of a French woman of the country; namely, a short gown and petticoat, with a blue cotton handkerchief wrapped around her head."

My guess: Native costume in Chicago

was similar to that of the Dominican woman on the left.

The words short gown refer to her jacket,

a rather old-fashioned working-class garment

by 1812. Her mistress is more fashionably dressed.

Even clad in French/Indian attire Margaret's pale complexion would not fool the young warriors, so sisters Archange and Suzanne hid her under a mattress. Suzanne "then seated herself with her sewing upon the front of the bed."

The Kinzie's House from Juliette Kinzie's book

" The Indians entered, and [Margaret] could occasionally see them from her hiding-place, gliding about, and stealthily inspecting every part of the room...until apparently satisfied that there was no one concealed, they left the house.

" All this time [Suzanne Buisson] had kept her seat upon the side of the bed, calmly assorting and arranging the patchwork of the quilt on which she was engaged, and preserving an appearance of the utmost tranquility, although she knew not but that the next moment she might receive a tomahawk in her brain. Her self-command unquestionably saved the lives of all present."

I know too little about frontier history to judge the accuracy or even the plausibility of this tale published 30 years later by Juliette Kinzie who heard it from her husband's family. Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events followed the period formula about white/Indian encounters, justifying Indian removal by their unpredictable violence while lauding a noble exception (Black Partridge.)

Juliette Kinzie 1806-1870

A founder of the Chicago Historical Society

If Suzanne Buisson were indeed sorting her patchwork scraps near Lake Michigan in 1812 she was likely using the printed cottons in stock at Fort Dearborn and the Kinzie store. One of calico's major markets was as trade goods and gifts for the tribes.

Tintype, Native American man

wearing a cotton shirt, late 19th century

We have no surviving early quilts from Native women or women of the French/Indian culture, although they might have made them. I find Mrs. Kinzie's story a bit suspect but we can remember the Chevalier sisters and their culture by finding inspiration in the crafts of Native Americans.

Epaulette

The imagery in these two embroidered pieces is based in tradition from India and Asia, adapted by European cultures and then by Native American artisans. The basic symmetries and simple floral shapes are often found in applique and embroidered quilts.

Two 19th-century Native American needlework items

from the collection of the McCord Museum in Montreal.

See a link below.

One could combine the Native American imagery as embroidery or applique in the central medallion format.

This quilt is dated 1822, made by Margaret Nowlan in Maumee, Ohio, and in the collection of the Smithsonian according to my notes. Although it's dated 10 years after the violence at Fort Dearborn the design seems very much of our period. The simple borders would be an excellent way to frame a piece of embroidery inspired by the Native American designs.

Here's the corner of a medallion with an embroidered center from dealer Jan Whitlock's webpage. Click here to see the full quilt. It's on the bottom row of the thumbnail pictures.

http://www.janwhitlocktextiles.com/portfolio/textiles/

Medallion with an embroidered center signed Mary Jones and dated 1795

The curators at the Art Institute of Chicago, where this quilt top is now, believe the patchwork was added twenty or so years later. Click here to see it at their site:

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/133632?search_id=27

Virtual quilt

I did a little Photoshopping here, plopping my virtually appliqued and embroidered center

into a top I started a few years ago. The Native American imagery is a little more modern to our eyes than the embroidered centers in the quilts above---less clutter, more visual shorthand for flowers.

But back to the Chevalier sisters...

During and after the War the women who lived near the Kinzie store remained near Lake Michigan. In 1829 Archange Ouilmette was granted land along the shore in what is now Wilmette. The family farmed there for about five years until the Potawatomi were again moved, sent west of the Mississippi River. Archange died in 1840 in western Iowa near the Missouri River.

Suzanne Buisson's husband continued as a trader with the American Fur Company in the Chicago/Peoria area but Sheshi disappears from the records. Margaret Helm and her husband remained in Chicago but their marriage was unhappy. She obtained a divorce in the 1820s.

The Potawatomi were moved again

in the 1840s to Kansas. Photograph about 1865.

Links
-Here's a comprehensive site to people, places and events in Early Chicago
http://www.earlychicago.com/

-Read Juliette Kinzie's Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events
http://www.archive.org/details/narrativeofmassa00kinz

See another epaulette at the McCord Museum in Montreal by clicking here:
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/ME938.1.12.1-2

The Royal Ontario Museum has many needlework objects by Native Americans. Click here
http://images.rom.on.ca/public/index.php?function=browse&action=selected&tbl=aa&filter=aa_coll&fid=5&sid=&ccid=
and browse through Decorative Arts
See another idea here:

http://www.brooklynkids.org/patternwizardry/pop_branch_bag.html

And this blog shows an embroidered sampler made by a girl born into the traders' culture in 1810.

http://wisconsinobject.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/favorite-finds-1/

One hundred years later a Sioux woman from the Standing Rock area in the Dakotas posed with needlework for photographer Frank Fiske. The interplay between European and Native American imagery continues.

More Eagles for Ideas

2011-10-25T06:00:00.004-05:00

Eagle and Stars Center Medallion,

Martha Randall Chesebrough, ca. 1808, 99” x 93”

Collection of the Fennimore Art Museum

This eagle quilt, similar to others from the first decades of the 19th century, will be on display through the end of the year at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

Unfolding Stories: Culture and Tradition in American Quilts "organized by renowned quilt scholar Jacqueline M. Atkins, the Fenimore Art Museum for the first time in over 15 years will display selections from its large collection of quilts. The exhibition will address themes of diversity, ethnicity and culture. Also included are the three award-winning quilts from the 2010 New York State of Mind Quilt Show." Through December 31, 2011.
Click here for more:

http://www.farmersmuseum.org/node

Here's one from the collection of the Benton County Historical Museum in Oregon. Again it's an interpretation of the Great Seal of the U.S. with a combination of cut-out chintz applique (in the border blocks) and conventional applique in the eagle and stars. See their post on it here:

http://www.bentoncountymuseum.org/horner/artifact.cfm?id=29

" Label on back, bottom right: 'Aunt Maggie gave this 1918 over 100 years old.' "

If Aunt Maggie is right the quilt would be from the teens. The fabric is very worn and the photos don't give us enough detail to determine the age but the quilt could be a souvenir from the patriotic wave of the War of 1812. Or it could be a "Union quilt" from the Civil War era, fifty years later.

Scroll through their collection which features several nice quilts, including another early example, a cut-out chintz medallion with a Greek key border.

http://www.bentoncountymuseum.org/horner/artifact.cfm?id=40

This last one is from an online auction a while back.

Could be early---I see no fabric or patchwork ideas in this snapshot that conflict with a "first quarter of 19th century date" although a detailed examination might reveal those pink and brown prints are late-19th century.

Five Popular Blocks for Martha's Quilt

2011-10-16T10:05:00.000-05:00

EQ sketch of Martha's quilt

Although the Penn's Treaty Quilt attributed to Martha Washington was made at least ten years before the War of 1812, its general medallion design alternating pieced and unpieced borders around a piece of toile would remain fashionable until the 1840s.

This similar Virginia quilt is dated to the 1840s.

Collection: Virginia Quilt Museum.

http://www.vaquiltmuseum.org/

Medallion from an online auction a few years ago

also features flying geese with stars

in the corners, the same border Martha used.

The five blocks that appear in Martha's pieced borders---basic patchwork of squares and triangles---are among the oldest designs we find in American quilts. These classics remain popular.

Measurements (All are Finished Measurements so add seams)

See the measurements for the unpieced strips and center in the last post. Notice the unpieced strips have contrasting squares (cornerstones) in the corners.

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/10/martha-washingtons-penns-treaty-quilt.html

Below is information for the alternate pieced borders.

Border B:

You will need 12 Square in a Square blocks finishing to 3".

Pieced Border = 3". Three pieced square in a square blocks in the center of each side. The rest may be strips or scrappy squares finishing to 3". The 4 borders measure 30" without the cornerstones. Border makes quilt 36".

Border D:

You will need 4 star blocks finishing to 4" for the cornerstones in the borders.

For the strips you need flying geese rectangles (D) finishing to 2" x 4". You'll need 10 of these rectangles per side, 40 in all. The picture above shows two of the rectangles.
4" Border makes quilt 48".

Border F:

You will need 4 cornerstone stars finishing to 6"

And 32 square in a square blocks finishing to 6".

Martha added extra pieced rectangles to adjust for this border's length. For these piece 8 flying geese rectangles 3" x 6" (Martha seems to have chopped hers off to fit.) Border makes quilt 64 1/2".

Border G:

This border is mostly unpieced strips finishing to 2-3/4". Each of four strips finish to 64 1/2" without the cornerstones. But she has pieced some rectangles into the corners of her strips here. Maybe, piece each 64 1/2"strip with corner rectangles of 5" brown strips finishing out the ends of 54 1/2" strips. Border makes quilt 70".

Border H:

You will need 28 pinwheel blocks finishing to 10".

And 4 four-patch blocks finishing to 10" for cornerstones.

Border makes quilt 90".

Click here to see a medallion believed to be from North Carolina, date estimated to be 1820-1840 from the International Quilt Study Center and Museum collection (#2004.048.0007).
http://cdn.firespring.com/images/2d6e6d78-d689-4c8f-9941-34b872951636.jpg

Here is another medallion from about the same time that may be American or English in the collection of the Winterthur Museum. It features a toile center like Martha's and is thought to be from the same period.
http://content.winterthur.org:2011/cdm/singleitem/collection/quilts/id/374/rec/56

Click here for a Virginia medallion made by Rebecca Ellen Davenport Blackwell from the collection of the Museum of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-9A

Martha Washington's Penn's Treaty Quilt

2011-10-09T06:00:00.125-05:00

Penn's Treaty Quilt

Attributed to Martha Washington, estimated date 1785.

Reading a 1905 biography of George Washington's secretary and in-law Tobias Lear, I came across a picture of this quilt. It's quite familiar although I have never seen a good photo of it. The caption says it was made by Martha Washington and given by her to Mrs. [Frances Dandridge Henley] Lear.

Frances Dandridge Henley Lear

1779 - 1856

Martha's sister's daughter.

Frances Dandridge Henley, Martha Washington's niece, was Tobias Lear's third wife. Louisa Lear Eyre, granddaughter through his first wife, wrote Lear's 1906 biography, Letters and recollections of George Washington: being letters to Tobias Lear ... explaining how she inherited this "very valuable and unique quilt, made by Mrs. Washington's own hands, which was used on George Washington's bed."

Penn's Treaty Quilt

Attributed to Martha Washington, estimated date 1785.

Collection of Mount Vernon Ladies Associaton

101" square

The quilt is now in the collection of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association which maintains Martha's home in Virginia. The pieced medallion is called the Penn's Treaty quilt because the central panel features a copperplate print of Pennsylvania's founder Willliam Penn negotiating with the natives to establish a colony. Note one of the treaty gifts is a bolt of cloth in the center.

Above and Below: Two versions of the Penn's Treaty copperplate print.

The fabrics were printed at the end of the 18th century and reproduced several times.

Brown and red versions have been found.

The red one above may be a 20th century reproduction.

Winterthur Museum curator Florence Montgomery in Printed Textiles counted at least three versions. She found an ad from 1788 describing "One set of hair colour [brown?] furniture cotton bed curtains, pattern William Penn's Treaty with the Indians. Three window curtains to match ditto." The seller: John Penn, Junior.

Diagram of the basic medallion
102" wide x 96" long

The quilt is hard to see in the photos but it's obvious that the composition is rather graceful and would make a good basis for a reproduction medallion. Martha alternated pieced and unpieced borders and used five of the most popular pieced blocks. So I have drawn it up in EQ7 with pattern information below.

How old is it? It's attributed to about 1785, based on the first printing of the toile fabric (copied from a painting and a paper print of the Treaty.)The quilt would have to be before 1802 as Martha died in May that year and was not feeling particularly well in the months before her death. This is the kind of medallion that would remain fashionable into the 1820s. Later examples would feature more flamboyant chintzes and brighter colors. I would put the date as 1795-1800 based on the span between the toile's appearance and Martha's death.

The funniest thing I found in doing web searches for more information about the quilt and Louisa Lear was this review of her book from a periodical named The Reader.

"WE have heaped many absurdities upon that excellent—though dead—gentleman, General George Washington. We have perpetuated ridiculous juvenile lore about him, have dubbed him "a steel engraving." have eliminated his charm and his magnificence, and held him up to a disapproving generation as a prig, and now we have condescended to accept the very residuum of the most negligible portion of his correspondence concerning domestic affairs.

The Reader, obviously a very sophisticated magazine.

These letters, addressed to his secretary. Tobias Lear, were written in the belief that, their commands having been executed, they would be consigned to the files destined for destruction. They were fit for such uses, and for no others. They dealt with the minutiae of farms, stock, kitchen service, tailors, vehicles, comings and goings, tenants, lawsuits, etcetera, etcetera. They were quite distinctly the affair of General Washington and of no other living soul save those employed to carry out his wishes.

That the descendant of his secretary should betray this orderly, frugal landowner and housekeeper, making his economies known and his shifts common talk, is justified only by one incident. The incident is that this descendant, Mrs. Eyre, has a quilt made by the industrious hands of Martha Washington. The quilt is mentioned early and oft; a fullpaged illustration of the variegated horror is, with misplaced pride, given an honorable place.

Said "fullpaged illustration of the variegated horror"

One long neglected lady whose portrait is published is differentiated from the rest of her sex by the mention that she is one of the series of three wives essayed by Mr. Tobias Lear, and that it was she who was the recipient of the quilt shown in a foregoing illustration. There is a quality of mind that rejoices in dinky historical souvenirs of this sort, but the mutual felicitations of such, their exchanges of trivial confidences and secret heart-burnings, need not be intruded on those of more vital activities."

Well, now we remember why it was hard to get people to pay serious attention to women's work.

Read more of that issue of The Reader by clicking here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZtrlAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA458&lpg=PA458&dq=tobias+lear+letters+eyre+the+reader&source=bl&ots=Uyo1N0FwBY&sig=rhTFmKB0Wd143aFkoC2SIClk6YU&hl=en&ei=iAiOTvaQMtO9tgecpsSiDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&sqi=2&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=tobias%20lear%20letters%20eyre%20the%20reader&f=false

The Plan for the Medallion

There are 9 borders A-I

Measurements (All are Finished Measurements so add seams)

The center finishes to 24" square.

A Unpieced (?) Strips= 3". Longer one finishes to 30", shorter 24". There is some kind of pattern in Martha's border, possibly a light print. Border makes quilt 30".

B Pieced Border = 3". Three pieced blocks (B) in the center of each side. The rest may be strips or scrappy squares finishing to 3". The 4 borders measure 30" without the cornerstones. Border makes quilt 36".

C Unpieced Striped strips = 2". Each 36" long. Add pinkish cornerstones. Border makes quilt 40".

D Pieced Flying Geese border (D) = 4". Cornerstone star (A) = 4" Border makes quilt 48".

E Unpieced Striped strips = 2-1/4". Each 48" long. Add dark cornerstones. Border makes quilt 52-1/2"

F Pieced Border = 6". Block F and Cornerstone star (A) = 6". There are odd extra pieces in the original to adjust for the size. For these modify Block E. Border makes quilt 64 1/2".

G Pieced Border = 2-3/4". Each of four strips finish to 64 1/2" without the cornerstones. But she has pieced some rectangles into the corners of her strips here. Maybe piece each 64 1/2"strip with corner rectangles of 5" brown strips finishing out the ends of 54 1/2" strips. Border makes quilt 70". (Notice I drew the rectangles into strip G because I had a hard time figuring out how to show rectangles just in the corners)

H Pieced Strip = 10" Pinwheels (H) with Four-Patches (C) for cornerstones. Border makes quilt 90".

I Unpieced Border = 6". I see only three borders but the top may be cropped out of the photo. Strips of patchwork finish to 90" without the cornerstones. 3 borders make quilt 102" x 96".

More about the blocks in the next post in a week or two.

2 Zebiah Smallwood Hewson: Domestic Manufacture

2011-10-01T08:00:00.004-05:00

Cut-out chintz quilt with Hewson panel.

Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Patricia Melton Smith. Click here for more:

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=36857

Philadelphia, the largest city in the U.S. about 1800

The young United States depended on the "carrying trade" for imports and exports. Tobacco and indigo shipped overseas paid for chintzes and china---luxuries that had become necessities. The continuing embargoes, sea battles and piracy that interrupted trade benefitted a few American merchants who could meet demand for domestic goods in the decades of the British Wars.

John Hewson (about 1744-1821)

Philadelphia's inland port was a center of industry. Among the workshops in the suburban industrial areas along the Delaware River was the Hewson "Calicoe Printing Manufactory and Bleach-Yard," a family operation since before the Revolution.

Document Hewson wood block print

Hewson matriarch Zebiah Smallwood Hewson was in her late fifties in 1812. She had seen war before. Her wedding day June 17, 1775 was the day the American Revolution commenced with British troops attacking Bostonians in what became known as The Battle of Bunker Hill.

Death of General Montgomery by John Trumbull, painted 1786.

Zebiah's cousin is on the ground in Trumbull's glorification

of Montgomery's death. Coins have spilled from

Captain Cheesman's pocket. Legend tells he

placed them there before the battle to pay for his funeral.

Zebiah (or Zibiah) suffered exile, hunger, terror and family losses during the first war with Britain. Husband John Hewson, English immigrant and rebel, was held prisoner by the British in 1778; her brother Lt. Aaron Smallwood was killed in New Jersey and cousin Captain Jacob Cheesman died with General Richard Montgomery in the siege of Quebec.

Hewson's panels featuring a vase of flowers

contributed to the Hewson legend as they are the most

recognizable of early domestically printed textiles.

Many quiltmakers, including Zebiah, used them in quilts.

Over the 35 years between the wars the Hewsons advertised many types of fabrics for sale: "calicoes and linens for gowns, &c. coverlids, handkerchiefs, nankeens, janes and velverets for waist coats and breeches...single and double purple prints...muslins of an elegant chintz pattern, prints for shauls,... blue handkerchiefs, with deep blue grounds and white spots…very neat gown-patterns."

A typical American indigo with "white spots"

The Hewson firm was characterized by a flexibility that enabled it to endure from 1774 until about 1820. Their longevity in a volatile business was also due to the support of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which awarded the Hewson Printworks subsidies, patent monopolies and a gold medal.

View of "the Jerseys" across the Delaware River

from the probable location of the

Hewson Printworks in Fishtown, Philadelphia

near Penn Treaty Park

The Hewsons represented the city's textile printers in Philadelphia's 1788 parade celebrating the new Federal Constitution with a 30-foot-long mobile textile mill drawn by ten horses. On the float draped with printed cotton: a working carding machine, spinning machine and two looms to demonstrate cloth production.

Pencilers illustrated in 1754.

The work had not changed by 1810.

"On the right was seated Mrs. Hewson and her 4 daughters, penciling a piece of very neat sprigged chintz of Mr. Hewson’s printing, all dressed in cottons of their own manufacture; on the back part of the carriage, on a lofty staff, was displayed the calico printer’s flag, in the center 13 stars in a blue field, and thirteen red stripes in a white field; round the edges of the flag was printed 37 different printes of various colours…."

We can imagine the spectacle and wish we'd been there to see the flag bordered with patchwork. The women "penciling" demonstrated a hand production technique considered appropriate for females. They brushed additional dyes onto the wood-block-printed fabrics.

Zebiah worked her time at the penciling table around her schedule as a mother. When she married John as a twenty-year-old he brought five young children whose mother had died after the birth of the last baby. She was more fortunate and survived twelve births including a pair of twins. At her death her husband wrote she was as "good and kind a mother to my five Motherless children [as] to the twelve children I had by her. About forty one years we lived together in love and unity."

Philadelphia's Chestnut Street about 1800

Philadelphia with periodic plagues of yellow fever, cholera and malaria was a difficult place to raise children. Only four of Zebiah's twelve babies survived to adulthood. The first two died during the hardships of the Revolution. Twins Phoebe and Priscilla, born in her forties, lasted only two weeks to die on the same summer day. Her stepchildren were hardier. The eldest John Jr. took over the fabric company in 1810 when his father retired. During the War he supplied the government with textiles while acting on the city's defense committee.

Reproduction Hewson print

In 1813 Zebiah's husband wrote an old friend of their ten surviving children and 37 grandchildren (ten had died). "I have great reason to be thankful that there is but one Scabby Sheep in my flock, who abandoned his wife and five fine children and left them to starve. It proved the death of his wife very soon---and his children we have amongst us." Zebiah in her fifties was raising five young grandchildren as well as a daughter still living at home. And she was not well. "Mrs. Hewson is just now recovr'd from a Six months confinement by Sickness & debility...."

We can only hope she had help. John's will indicates they lived comfortably. He left silver, elegant furniture and mirrors to his many heirs. He summarized his career, pleased that his undertakings "often exceeded my expectations. You might be led to think I might have grown rich; but I never cared much about that…though not rich. I have been a Useful Citizen & not the worst of neighbours."

Detail of a printed bedcover from the

Hewson printworks in the Winterthur Museum.

The border stripe's been reproduced.

Notice the printed version of the Vandyke scallop.

Zebiah died in 1815 right after the War was over. When her husband died six years later he left John Jr. the gold medal and the tools of the trade, to his daughters several bedcovers, chintz curtains and quilts.

See a quilt Zebiah made about the time of the War of 1812. She featured the panel and probably many other prints from the family firm. Her husband willed this quilt to Zebiah's daughter Ann's family who gave it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1934.

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/108224.html?mulR=12040

This is the time to stockpile Hewson fabrics. Andover (my competitors) have done a wonderful line in conjunction with the Winterthur Museum. Here is the fabric with the central vase repeated. It should be available this month. [UPDATE: Now the word is the Hewson reproductions will be available in December.]

You could piece it into the center of the field of patchwork you started last month.

Or you could do what Zebiah did and frame it in a border of triangles.

Here's a mockup of her center. She put small dogtooth stars in the corners but the butterflies in the new reproductions would look good appliqued there.

Fashion plate from 1811

shows the importance of scalloped edges

Both Zebiah and the anonymous quilter who made the quilt at the top of this post used appliqued triangles as borders for their floral panel. We tend to call this free-cut applique a dogtooth border. Quilt historian Sandi Fox pointed out the relationship between these pointed scalloped borders and a fashionable finish in clothing called a Vandyke scallop.

See a lot more about the Vandyke scallop or dogtooth border in my blog post here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/12/dogtooth-borders.html

A Note about the Hewson Myth

The Hewson printworks have a false reputation as America's first calico printers but directories and advertisements indicate several colonial printers decorated fabric with wood block, stencil and brush before the Hewson factory opened in 1774. By 1812 dozens of small ventures were creating domestically printed cottons and linens throughout the country.

Hewson daughter Sarah Alcock published a book about her father as a hero of the Revolution and "America's FIRST calico printer." Read it here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=NL9YAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=sarah+alcock+hewson&hl=en&ei=L3daTv_fJaHV0QGq2Oz2DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

I am looking for something like this simple dot,

madder brown on madder red,

which is what Zebiah used for her triangle dogtooth border.

I might print it myself but I shouldn't have any trouble finding

something similar. It's so modern looking.

Another Eagle Quilt in a Field of Patchwork

2011-09-18T16:34:00.002-05:00

Quilt donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1947

attributed to members of the Brown-Frances family

of Canterbury, Connecticut

This undated quilt is attributed to the first decades of the 19th century and may well reflect the patriotism of the War of 1812. Although the fabrics and the style are simpler than the eagle quilt in the last post the quilts have several design ideas in common.

Both feature a central eagle drawn from the Great Seal of the United States, but this artist has few of the drawing skills shown in the chintz eagle. The fabrics in this more primitive example have none of the flair of the imported prints in that quilt.

The central eagle floats in a field of patchwork, in this case a nine-patch block that creates a neat chained design.

The Smithsonian has another early Connecticut quilt with a similar field of patchwork. The prints are simple, dyed with blue indigos and brown vegetable dyes, perhaps printed in the United States rather than shipped from Europe or India.

The quilt was donated in the 1890s by John Brenton Copp of Stonington, Connecticut, part of a comprehensive gift of textiles and other furnishings.

Notice the shell quilting in the plain blocks, a common period pattern that lost favor as the 19th century progressed. The quilter alternated parallel diagonal lines in the blocks.

We can buy templates but they probably used a circle of some kind, perhaps a coin.

See more about the two Connecticut quilts by clicking on these links:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=7230

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=9545

A comment reminded me that Jan Patek has done an interpretation of that Smithsonian eagle at the top. See her book if you'd like a pattern.

Quilt From the Era

2011-09-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Over the months I'll provide inspiration and ideas for period quilts with quilts actually from the era. Few quilts survive with dates 1812-1815 but this chintz eagle medallion is not only dated 1814 it is inscribed with a patriotic motto under the eagle.

"Strong in thy strength we bend no Knee

To Monarcks or to Tyranny

But borne upon thy ample opinion

We ride to freedom and dominion

1814"

The eagle is the great seal of the United States, used since the 1780s,

with 17 stars (Louisiana, the 18th state was admitted in 1812.)

The applique combines cut-out chintz with conventional applique.

The inked verse, a tribute to freedom, seems derived from poetry of publisher and diplomat Joel Barlow who published The Columbiad in 1808, an epic about America with the lines:

Almighty Freedom! give my venturous song

The force, the charm that to thy voice belong....

Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,

Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee.

The outer border is a pillar or architectural print framing a field of hexagonal patchwork (undoubtedly paper template pieced). Someone had access to the latest imported fabric.

The quilt top was pictured in the 1989 Quilt Engagement Calendar from antique dealers John and Jeannette Bronstein. It looks very English but the verse and Great Seal are very American.

The letters in the banner are worn away. It may have said "E Pluribus Unum"---Out of Many One.