Paintings and Quilts 2 -- "A Few of My Favorite Things"

Looked high and low for more quilts in paintings and did find some, particularly among Norman Rockwell's paintings, pointing to the quilt's place in Americana.

Porch by Andrew Wyeth, with the quilt behind the dog

Colonial Quilts by Childe Hassam

and by Norman Rockwell--

A  Scout Is Helpful

Reading in Bed

Tucking into Bed

Christmas Eve

Paintings and Quilts Part 1

"Warm and Pretty"

It is September 1923, and Dabney Fairchild is marrying Troy Flavin in the Fairchild family house in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, first published in 1946. We see all the hustle and bustle and the intricate weaves of the relationships of all the family members in this portrayal of a way of life is, for the most part, no more. Here is a short excerpt when hand-made quilts arrive the day before the wedding, sent by the bridegroom's mother:

But Troy was pushing his way into the parlor, intent.
"Look," he said, "everybody look. Did you ever think your mother could make something like this? My mammy made these, I've seen her do it. A thousand stitches! Look--these are for us, Dabney."
"Quilts!" Dabney took his arm. "Shelley! Come in and look. Troy, come speak to Aunt Tempe--she's come for the wedding. Papa's sister from Inverness."
But he flung her off and held up a quilt of jumpy green and blue. "'Delectable Mountains,'" he said. "Pleased to meet you, ma'am. I swear that's the 'Delectable Mountains.' Do you see how any lady no higher'n a grasshopper ever sewed all those little pieces together? Look, 'Dove in the Window.' Where's everybody?"
They all came forward and watched Troy spread out the quilts, snatch them together, spread them out again...

"What's the name of this quilt?" asked Dabney, arms on her hips.
"Let's see. I think it's 'Tirzah's Treasure,' but it might be 'Hearts and Gizzards.' I've spent time under both."

"Ma pieced that top of a snowy winter," said Troy gravely staring, his eyes far away.
"I wish I could make something like that," said Aunt Primrose gallantly.
"Not everybody can," said Troy. "But 'Delectable Mountains,' that's the one I am for Dabney and me to sleep under most generally, warm and pretty."

Haute Couture Has Nothing Over Mrs. Grace Snyder

Flower Basket Petit Point Quilt by Grace Snyder, 1940

Grace McCance Snyder, the Nebraskan pioneer, started piecing quilts when she was only seven. Charged by her father with watching the cattle in the fields, she would lie or sit on the back of her favorite and sew all day. Through the next decades of her life, Mrs. Snyder made tens of quilts for her family and later in her life for exhibition. She became Nebraska's most famous quilter and was inducted into the Quilters' Hall of Fame in 1980 at the age of 98. Two of her quilts are on the list of the Twentieth Century's 100 Best American Quilts.


Section of the Petit Point quilt showing the needlepoint effect of the piecing.

Mrs. Snyder accomplished the Flower Basket Petit Point quilt in 16 months, basing her design on the pattern of a china plate produced by the Salem China Company of Ohio. In her design, she used a triangle for each stitch of the petit point to achieve a pointellist impression on the quilt's surface. It took Mrs. Snyder 87,875 tiny triangles, no bigger than a fingernail, and 5 miles of thread to sew to create the Petit-Point quilt!

Here are other samples of Mrs. Snyder's quilting.







A documentary segment has been produced about Mrs. Snyder's quilting, and her work and life were featured in the International Quilt Study Study Center and Museum of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

You may also want to see: Fashion and Quilting: Two Roads

650 American Red and White Quilts!

Thanks to Ancient Industries, I have learned of this extraordinary exhibition in New York City's Park Avenue Armory. What's showing: a collection of 650 red and white quilts constructed by American women over three centuries. The quilts, from the collection of Joanna S. Rose, are on display from March 25 through March 30.

A Summer Quilt Tour, Anyone?

Quilt--a mix of the old and the new--from the 2008 Sister Outdoor Quilt show in Oregon.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on country quilt tours with a slideshow of quilts and quilt paintings on barn doors. The article also features a listing of quilt shows around the country this summer. The Journal article by Meg Cox notes this happy news: "The number of quilt makers in the U.S. has doubled in the past decade, as new tools, like quilt-design software, have spread. There has been a corresponding explosion in the number of quilt shows, and they aren’t just for those who stitch or collect. Go and be dazzled." I can just picture it now: I take a summer driving tour across the United States with a quilt-show itinerary! I bet I'd meet a lot of great people too.

Irish Chain Quilt for a Wee One

Just in the nick of time, this week I finished this hand-sewn single Irish chain quilt for a beautiful little girl who arrived yesterday. Her mom is a friend of my daughter and me. When I started the quilt I didn't know if the baby would be a girl or a boy, but the mother's favorite color is blue, so I chose a blue and white palette. I wanted a light blue toile for the large squares and was pleased as punch to find a light blue toile with scenes from Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit. I figured that the dotted swiss would also be light enough to make it suitable for a girl.

I have the top hand-pieced for a child's quilt, but this is the first quilting I have done. The prospect scared me so much that I did not use a hoop. Somehow I felt that trying to use a new contraption would make the project so daunting, I would not be able to do it at all. So this was kind of experimentation, and the next time I feel I will be relaxed enough to try a hoop. There are really a lot of imperfections in the quilting, but I learned a lot.


I quilted the larger blocks with an apple pattern from Irish Chain Quilts: Single, Double, and Triple by Sharon Cerny Ogden.

I love the Irish chain pattern. For a beginner, it is nice and simple, and I love the lattice look of it across a bed. I have collected the fabric for a yellow-orange flower triple Irish chain, which is the next quilt I would like to piece. But before that, I think I better quilt the other top that I have pieced and before that...Christmas is on its way like a high-speed train!!!

Quilting Stories

In the last year I have come across two short stories about quilting: "A Jury of Her Peers," by Susan Glaspell, 1918 and "The Bedquilt," by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1906. "A Jury of Her Peers" is available online here. Find the "Bedquilt" in The Bedquilt and Other Stories, which I am now reading and enjoying. More on Dorothy Canfield Fisher later, I hope.
Do you know of other quilting stories?

Fashion and Quilting: Two Roads

In my obsession with quilting, I have been thinking about the differences between quilting and fashion. There is no doubt that both activities require a high degree of craftsmanship. Although quilting and clothes making were once part of the same activity in the home--making objects from fabric of utility for the family and trying to make them beautiful--they seem to have taken radically different roads in the 20th century.


Dictating fashion style from the office.

If we are to believe the Fashion Diva in The Devil Wears Prada, fashion--even the clothes that ordinary people wear--is dictated from the top down. In one scene, her new underling is caught snickering at the process of choosing a belt for a dress. Asked to explain herself, the girl says: "Y'know, it's just that both these belts look exactly the same to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about this stuff." To which the diva gives this fascinating and informative reply:
"This 'stuff'? Oh, I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean.

You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St. Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff."

Quilting seems to go the other way.


Mrs. Bill Staggs, migrant worker in Pietown, New Mexico, displays her handmade quilt in 1940.

Quilting's artistic achievement often comes from what seems to be the most humble of origins and filters upward. The extremes in this are the creative impulses seem in Amish and Gee's Bend quilts, both of which come from some of the most isolated communities in the country. These creative impulses generated new trends in quilt making among women in the broader community.


A Gee's Bend quilt. It is believed that by virtue of its extreme isolation on an Alabama peninsula, the African-American community of Gee's Bend was able to keep African cultural motifs alive--both in music and in quilt making. These quilts were created for utilitarian purposes from old clothes and discarded materials. Of course, this is part of a great tradition of African American quilt making, which includes the use of the quilts as maps in the underground railway.


An Amish quilt. The great antique Amish quilts were vibrant in design and color. Their vibrancy in part was owed to hand-dying of the material with plant dyes. The colors are the color of Amish clothes.

However, quilt historian Gerald Roy noted briefly on the Love of Quilting TV show that as a collector, he seeks the quilts that show artistic deviations from patterns. He said that in the 19th century, there were quilting and block traditions but not patterns and kits, so that each quilt was genuinely the artistic expression of the quilter or group of quilters.


An appliqued and stuffed quilt from 1820--before any standardization in quilt making. The stuffed quilt has its origin in the British Isles.

Quilting as an activity suffered a hiatus during World War I, went through a revival in the 1930s when women's fashion also became feminine again, and then suffered another hiatus during World War II, Roy reported. After the war, quilting became to revive again, but women no longer had time to hand-quilt as they used to and didn't have time to experiment. There was a far greater reliance on kits and patterns produced by professionals. This has resulted in a standardization of quilting, according to Roy. However, in the blogs that I read I see a lot of experimentation in quilting and fun with it.


A quilt with a religious theme from Ritacor. See the pictures of her marvelous quilts from Portugal, where she lives. Her blog is in Portuguese but with fascinating and informative pictures.

Be that as it may, the fashion industry went through this standardization process with first the manufactured pattern and then the industry's industrialization and production for mass consumption. Perhaps Project Runway will revive the home designer-seamstress. I find it a pretty daunting proposition myself but then I am a very fledgling seamstress.

Another difference between quilting and fashion is that quilting is a tradition, and I think many women who quilt seek to maintain and build on that tradition.


The great Baltimore Album quilt tradition. This is the perfect social quilt, with each person contributing a block of the album. Plus they are always breathtakingly gorgeous.


Jane Stickle's quilt of 225 different quilt blocks from 1863. There is an international project of women re-creating the blocks of this quilt. The quilt is a whole course in block making on to itself.

Quilt making is an activity that is based upon the traditions of the past, even if the quilt involves modern-day trends and innovations. And the quilt is often produced for the future--a hand-sewn quilt can become an heirloom. The past, the present in the quilt making, and the future.

Fashion's time space is the present--the season. Although there is a haute couture tradition of workmanship and craft, design in today's fashion world seems to favor the new and iconoclastic.

And whereas fashion, in keeping with the times, seems to hurl girls and women out of the home to exert power in the world, quilting is an artistic expression that is a quest for comfort and beauty in the home.

There is a revival today in sewing, and I hope it lasts--a penchant for the homemade. It is hard to imagine women going back to sewing all their own clothes, but perhaps skills will reach such levels that more women are able to add those artistic and practical deviations that will breathe new life into the seamstress craft. Already it is clear that the re-emergence of aprons on the market and the new "retro" fabric dresses of the 2008 spring season reflect the yearning of women, found everywhere on women's blogs, for fashion that is centered on a practicality and beauty linked with a domesticity many thought was a thing of the past. Then there is the Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll, who consciously brought patchwork motifs (see above) into his designs, reflecting the sewing craft of his mother in rural Pennsylvania.

February is Quilting Month at "Sew, Mama, Sew"

Carrie Severt on the porch with her wash and Star Quilt.

If you are interested in quilting or in the history of quilting, I encourage you to go check out the Sew, Mama, Sew Blog . Everyday this month, Sew, Mama, Sew is featuring a post about quilting--on techniques, projects that you can make and post and exchange, articles on different kinds of quilts written by experts. It is a fascinating venture. But I am prompted to make this post because of today's article on the tradition of quilting with wonderful documentary photographs and links to more information on American quilting. In looking for some pictures of the American quilting tradition, I came across the Library of Congress collection called Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978-1996. Here are some samples of the quilts collected and their quilters from the Blue Ridge areas of Virginia and North Carolina.

Lively block quilt by Donna Choate, below, with her husband.


A lovely yo-yo quilt and its quilter below, Elizabeth Smith.


Beautiful Cathedral quilt by Ila Patton, below.

"Holding Grandmother's Quilt" in Philadelphia

Here are photos of two murals at 3922 Aspen Street in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the mural capital of the USA. An organization called Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia, launched a campaign to create murals throughout the city as part of an anti-graffiti campaign. These two murals were created across from each other on Aspen Steet and a small park was created in the vacant lots next to them. These murals are a wonderful celebration of a great art. I will be creating a Philadelphia mural screensaver, so if you would like one, let me know.

The Riches of Quiltmaking

Here is a picture of a woman in West Virginia in 1972 with the quilt she has just made. She is not a wealthy woman, as the picture indicates. It is likely that she has worked hard all of her life. Yet, look at her gorgeous work--a unique masterpiece of crazy quilting--a spread fit for a king. Who would say that there are no outlets for creativity for women in the home? This is, however, an art that is not dead and is more than likely reviving. Even down at the National Science Foundation, where I had to go weekly until recently, there was a quilting club, where ladies gathered on the lunch hours to quilt.

A Quilt

For a beautiful idea of what the feminine virtues and crafts can mean and why we need them, see this post on the SouleMama blog.