By: Xenia E. Cord 

Kit quilts played an important role in the resurgence of quiltmaking during the Colonial Revival movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Commercially produced, media-promoted kits redirected the focus of quiltmaking from a community-based folk group process to a professionally created product stressing surface design. That perceptual change created a popular market, resulting in a flood of replicated quilt designs.

An analysis of catalogs and kits reveals some of the complex and obscure relationships among companies marketing quiltmaking components in inexpensive,

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Marketing Quilt Kits in the 1920s and 1930s  »

By: Ricky Clark 

Ruth Finley, pioneering quilt author, lived the first half of her life in Ohio’s Western Reserve. This paper investigates the influences of that region on her later life and writing, and on her involvement in the Colonial Revival. Sources for the paper include family letters and documents, Finley’s personal notes, public records, interviews with people who knew Finley, and field research conducted in villages where her family lived.

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Ruth Finley and the Colonial Revival Era  »

By: Naida Treadway Patterson 

Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton, born to a Boston family of wealth and social prominence and educated in the East and abroad, began her career as an artist in the early 1930s. After success as a watercolorist and muralist, she drew upon her skill as a designer and her love of needlework to produce, in 1940, an applique Bible Story quilt. This quilt was the genesis of more than fifty applique quilt designs,

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Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton: Designer of Story Book Quilts, 1940-1965  »

By: Merikay Waldvogel 

In 1928, the Stearns & Foster Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio, repackaged its cotton batting and became a potent force in promoting quilts. Through national advertising and company sponsored quilt exhibits, the firm increased sales of Mountain Mist batting and also created a demand for its wrapper patterns. Earlier attempts to research the patterns have been limited to information gleaned from wrappers, pamphlets, and advertisements, since company records had been lost.

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The Origin of Mountain Mist® Patterns  »

By: Marlene O’Bryant-Seabrook 

Like many Southern African-American women, Maggie McFarland Gillispie was taught to quilt by her mother. She, in turn, passed the skill to her only child – a son. This paper reviews the literature on Southern African-American matrilineal quilters, discusses the existence of African males in the textile arts in Africa and during slavery, and explains how European gender-role ideology has permeated the African-American male views of quilting and other needle arts.

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Symbiotic Stitches: The Quilts of Maggie McFarland Gillispie and John Gillispie, Jr.  »

By: Kathryn W. Berenson 

All-white, whole-cloth, corded and quilted hand-stitched needlework from Provence, France, known as Marseilles needlework, has a long, rich tradition dating back seven centuries. An examination of commercial records, eighteenth-century paintings, inventories, textile artifacts, and written documents provides information on the origins and on the development of Marseilles needlework techniques and motifs, and on the large commercial production for export that probably influenced European and American quilting traditions.

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Origins and Traditions of Marseilles Needlework  »

By: Judy Elsley 

This paper addresses some of the differences existing between independent and academic quilt scholars, disagreements that prevent the two groups from working congenially together.

The author examines the contention that some disciplinary approaches are more appropriate to quilt studies than others. She shows that academics’ theoretical training predisposes them to a different set of agendas and interests than quilt scholars more focused on material culture.

Approaching the topic through the perspective of literary criticism,

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Making Critical Connections in Quilt Scholarship  »

By: Carol Williams Gebel 

This study surveys the function of quilts in ceremonial rites and customs related to death, the final rite of passage. It examines quilts in the context of several cultures both historic and contemporary, including European-American, Polynesian, Native American, African, and some Asian groups.

Quilts have been used when “laying out” the deceased; for wrapping the body of the deceased, and for lining the coffin. Some permanently remain in or on the grave,

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Quilts in the Final Rite of Passage: A Multicultural Study  »