By: Virginia Gunn

The McCall Publishing Company, one of the pioneers in the nineteenth-century paper pattern industry, started business by offering sewing patterns for ladies’ and children’s fashions. Needlework designs and related publications gradually became an important component of its pattern business, and the company played a little-known but significant role in the American quilt revival of the 1920s and 1930s. The company attracted and retained leaders and editors who responded quickly and in positive ways to new technology to fashion trends,

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McCall’s Role in the Early Twentieth-Century Quilt Revival  »

By: Pamela Weeks

Potholder quilts, made by joining a number of individually finished blocks, exemplify a technique practiced in New England during the mid-nineteenth century. The purchase of a single quilt of this construction in 1999 led the author to search for additional examples and to adopt the term “potholder” to facilitate identification. An examination of eighty-one potholder quilts made before 1950 suggests that the technique emerged as a local variation within a larger national tradition of inscribed quilts.

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“One Foot Square, Quilted and Bound”: A Study of Potholder Quilts  »

By: Nao Nomura

Starting in the 1970s, traveling exhibitions of American quilts introduced Japanese audiences to what they perceived as a quintessentially American form of material culture. Since that time Japanese quiltmakers have adopted and adapted quiltmaking in ways that are highly influenced by American traditions yet simultaneously particular to Japanese culture. This paper examines the introduction, popularization, and diffusion of the appropriation of American aesthetics, the establishment of ‘quilt schools’

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The Development of Quiltmaking in Japan since the 1970s  »

By: Jonathan Gregory

Three comprehensive grassroots projects have emerged during the first decade of the twenty-first century to make quilts for the families of American service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Marine Comfort Quilts, Operation Homefront Quilts, and Home of the Brave Quilt Project all operate nationally, yet independently. They embrace similar missions, but they implement them differently. The current study is based on oral interviews with the founders of each project and other active participants.

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Wrapped in Meanings: Quilts for Families of Soldiers Killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars  »

By: Jane Przybysz

For years now, whenever anyone has asked me why the first quilt museum in the United States, the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, was founded in California – rather than New England or the Southeastern United States – I’ve explained that, in my view, three things came together in California in a way they didn’t come together in other parts of the country.

First was the Berkley-based,

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Seminar Keynote Address – Bay Area Beginnings: The American Quilt Study Group and the Twentieth-Century California Fiber Art Movement  »

By: Anita B. Loscalzo

Prussian blue, a cool, greenish-blue mineral color discovered around 1706, became an important artist’s pigment in the eighteenth century and a low-coast alternative to indigo for coloring textiles in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its popularity as a colorant for textiles coincided with improved printing and dyeing processes developed in Europe and adopted into the United States. American and European fabrics printed or dyed with Prussian blue appear most frequently in quilts made into Untied States between 1830 and the mid-185-s,

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Prussian Blue: The Development of a Colorant and Its Use in Textiles  »