By: Teri Klassen

This study of a rare southern Indiana quilt pattern that dates to the Mexican War (1846-1848) gives insight into how quiltmaking acquired its longstanding associations with patriotism and with the refined yet industrious American homemaker ideal. Analysis of the five known occurrences of this pattern, Polk’s Fancy, shows how English, Scotch-Irish, and German influences contributed to development of a distinctive American quilt style. This study examines women’s use of needlework as a means of participating in the Mexican War and their use of commemorative quiltmaking as a way to present themselves publicly as citizens.

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Polk’s Fancy: Quiltmaking, Patriotism, and Gender in the Mexican War Era  »

By: Ronda McAllen

Album quilts produced in and around Baltimore, Maryland, in the 1840s and 1850s are among the most elaborate examples of nineteenth-century quiltmaking. Previous research linked these quilts to quiltmakers of the Methodist and German Reform faiths. New research, however, suggests a group of these remarkable quilts were owned and may have been created by Jewish women who had recently emigrated from Germany. Given these women’s origins, closed culture,

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Jewish Baltimore Album Quilts  »

By: Nao Nomura and Janneken Smucker 

In this article, we use three methods of investigation – fiber and fabric analysis, genealogy, and fieldwork – to re-examine Amish quilts from the Henry and Jill Barber Collection of Amish quilts from Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, at the International Quilt Study Center (IQSC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We use our data to confront unsubstantiated assumptions – most notably the idea of a classic period of Amish quiltmaking prior to 1940 – that quilt enthusiasts have perpetuated over the past several decades.

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From Fibers to Fieldwork: A Multifaceted Approach to Re-examining Amish Quilts  »

By: Loretta G. H. Woodard

In Hawaii, during the Territorial years (1900-1959), when there were no commercially printed Hawaiian quilt patterns, communities of quilters collected and exchanged designs. Hawaiian appliqué and flag quilt motifs were traced onto newsprint or other paper and, occasionally, onto woven fabric, oilcloth, wax paper, or even old sheets of barkcloth tapa (kapa). A widespread code of ethics ensured that patterns and their names were preserved as a common corpus of design.

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Communities of Quilters: Hawaiian Pattern Collecting, 1900-1959  »

By: Laurann Gilbertson

Immigrants from Norway settled in large numbers in the Midwestern United States during the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. Many of these immigrants came from rural areas and may not have been familiar with piecework quilts before arriving in America. This study explores the history of Norwegian-American quiltmaking in the Midwest before 1930. Sources include diaries, letters, memoirs, and the histories of quilts in museum collections. This paper describes the materials and techniques Norwegian immigrants and their descendants used for making quilts;

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Patterns of the New World: Quiltmaking Among Norwegian Americans  »

By: Marsha MacDowell, Charlotte Quinney, and Mary Worrall

In 2000, the Michigan State University Museum accepted the donation of an embroidered signature quilt that challenged accepted notions of quilts as instruments of good, providing warmth, comfort, joy, and support. The quilt was made in 1926 by a group of individuals as a fundraiser in Chicora, Michigan, to support the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The materials, construction, design, pictorial imagery,

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The KKK Fundraising Quilt of Chicora, Michigan  »

By: Beverly Gordon 

This article looks at crazy quilts as an expression of the fairyland sensibility that pervaded the late nineteenth century. Fairyland, overlaid in the popular mind with the sensuousness of the Orient, was an aesthetically charged, imaginary place – the kind immortalized in the period’s Wizard of Oz books. It was a beautiful, romantic dream, a counterpoint to the rule-bound, rationalistic industrial age. By the last decades of the century,

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Crazy Quilts as an Expression of “Fairyland”  »