Zig-Zag Borders

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

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

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

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

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