By: Virginia Gunn

Contrary to the widespread belief that Americans were late in adopting “art deco” styles, a survey of popular American needlework, fashion, and decorating magazines published between 1900 and 1940 reveals that these European fashion and design trends were rather quickly, and first, incorporated into both clothing and furnishings for the most intimate room of the house – the bedroom. After 1910 American women began using “colonial revival” as a strategy for embracing “moderne” ideas,

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Quilts for Milady’s Boudoir  »

By: Suellen Meyer

In a study of periodicals, advertising brochures, and sewing machine manuals from 1830-1900, I found that sewing machine companies sold their machines to men for the benefit of their wives. Although the companies and the magazines emphasized machines for sewing clothes, women transferred machine sewing to quiltmaking. A study of nineteenth-century quilts revealed that during the third quarter, women highlighted the machine by using it for appliqué or quilting.

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Early Influences of the Sewing Machine and Visible Machine Stitching on Nineteenth-Century Quits  »

By: Nancilu B. Burdick

In this study of more than 30 quilts made between 1817 and 1950, largely in Western New York, an unusual variety of textiles and pieced patterns is represented. The quilts are indicative of the ingenuity and fine aesthetic sense of the women of a pioneer family who, by accident, settled in one of the loveliest regions of New York State: The Letchworth Park area.

When Julia Boyer Reinstein,

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The Julia Boyer Reinstein Collection  »

By: Jane Przybysz

Quilt-garment fashion shows have become a standard feature of contemporary quilt festivals. Since 1978, Fairfield Processing Corporation has invited contemporary quilters to design and construct pieced, quilted and hand-worked clothing for an annual fashion show mounted at what – over the years- has become the Houston International Quilt Festival. In the summer of ’88, Fairfield staged a ten-year retrospective of quilted garments that have been shown at the festival.

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The Body En(w)raptured: Contemporary Quilted Garments  »

By: Gail Andrews Trechsel

Quilts have been the constant companions of American women for over two centuries, created for all occasions, giving comfort day to day. Women made quilts to commemorate births and marriages, to honor community leaders and friends, and to memorialize the dead. Quilts in this last group, mourning quilts, provided the maker with a tangible memorial to the departed and sometimes served a practical purpose in the burial process of the home.

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Mourning Quilts in America  »

By: Elizabeth Weyrauch Shea and Patricia Cox Crews

Data on 784 quiltmakers representing 1593 quilts made before 1940 were collected during 18 Nebraska Quilt History Days. Information garnered from questionnaires and oral interviews were used to develop a demographic profile of Nebraska quiltmakers. Analysis and interpretation of the data yielded insights into their motivations for quiltmaking and quiltmaking practices. Most quiltmakers were Nebraska-born, rural homemakers for whom quiltmaking was a lifetime activity.

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Nebraska Quiltmakers: 1870-1940  »

By: Eleanor Hamilton Sienkiewicz

Dr. William Rush Dunton, Jr. (1868-1966) was a psychiatrist who spent some half a century documenting the quilts of Maryland and nearby states. He self-published Old Quilts in 1946. In that book he repeatedly expressed the hypothesis that there may have been an artist behind the best examples of these quilts, the genre we now call Baltimore Album Quilts.

In addition to Old Quilts Dr.

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The Marketing of Mary Evans  »

By: Debra Ballard

In a study of 12 quilters and their family members of Hope Lutheran Church, Gladwin County, Michigan, I found that the Ladies Aid Quilting Group provided a very important social function for the community as a whole. The ages of the quilters interviewed ranged from 55 to 92 years. The group has been quilting together for over 50 years. In reading 25 years of minutes from the group between the years of 1940-1974,

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The Ladies Aid of Hope Lutheran Church  »

By: Bets Ramsey

A new day for needlework artists dawned in the late 1940’s when the Bertha Schaffer Gallery in New York chose to show the fabric collage and embroidery of Mariska Karasz. The exhibition signaled recognition of textile arts as being worthy of inclusion in the fine arts. But then, Mariska Karasz always was ahead of the times. To celebrate the pioneer efforts of this artist, her daughter, ceramist Solveig Cox,

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A Tribute to Mariska Karasz  »

By: Barbara Brackman

Before the nationwide influence of the periodical pattern column, American quilt styles and patterns were more likely to show regional trends as design ideas were passed hand to hand. To track the spread of styles and patterns in the mid-nineteenth century I compiled a computerized database of 250 date-inscribed album samplers and single-pattern friendship quilts made between 1839 and 1950, pictured in the quilt literature or unpublished. Many had states,

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Signature Quilts: Nineteenth-Century Trends  »