By: Diana Bell-Kite

Gathering satin acetate florist ribbons from the gravesides of deceased loved ones and stitching them into quilts was widespread among working-class Southerners—black and white—from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. Scholars have noted this unique form of commemorative quilting in passing, but have yet to examine the tradition’s regionalism, its limited lifespan, and its relationship to wider trends in mid-twentieth century American society. Analyzing twenty-eight such quilts from eight states,

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Memorials of Satin: Funeral Ribbon Quilts in Context  »

By: Peggy J. Hazard
Illegal immigration has become a humanitarian crisis on both sides of the Atlantic. One fact often left out of the conversation about migration to the United States from Mexico is that thousands of undocumented—and frequently unidentified—men, women and children have died in the Southern Arizona deserts since the imposition of trade and border policies in the 1990s. The Migrant Quilt Project is a grassroots effort in Tucson, Arizona,

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What the Eye Doesn’t See, Doesn’t Move the Heart: Migrant Quilts of Southern Arizona  »

By: Terry Tickhill Terrell

Elizabeth Stanton, a young Quaker girl, created an inscribed, one pattern, allograph quilt with dates ranging from 1856 to 1865. The quilt contains fifty- three names, said by the quilter’s descendants to be family and friends who were members of the Stillwater Monthly Meeting. In examining that claim, it became clear that deaths in the quilter’s family, religious upheaval, and historic events including the Civil War were pertinent to the construction and meaning of the quilt to the quilter herself.

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The Elizabeth Stanton Inscribed Quaker Quilt  »

By: Linda Baumgarten

Because the patterns of wholecloth quilts are created by the stitching alone, photographs—and even first-hand examination—may fail to show the subtle designs sufficiently well to compare them from one piece to the other. For this study, the author analyzed sixteen wholecloth bed quilts and petticoats, all of which feature two-handled bulbous vases of symmetrically placed flowers. Line drawings created from high-resolution photographs brought into a computer-assisted-design (CAD) program allowed the researcher to easily compare details in the subtle wholecloth pieces.

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Vase-Pattern Wholecloth Quilts in the Eighteenth-Century Quaker Community  »

By: Gail Bakkom

“Candlewicks,” white embroidered counterpanes emphasizing raised stitches, comprise a portion of early-nineteenth-century American textiles neglected in researchers’ current focus on quilts, coverlets, and samplers. A few published photos demonstrate the unique quality of this work, but available texts reveal a lack of specific information and little or no context. This study, based on a database of 300 pieces (140 date-inscribed) created by the author, traces candlewicks from early dated examples in the 1790s through the technique’s popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century,

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“Candlewicks”: White Embroidered Counterpanes in America 1790–1880  »

By: Amanda Sikarskie

Erica Wilson is best known as a teacher and designer of embroidery. Her role in the Quilt Revival of the 1970s is less well known. Through the lens of her television program, Erica, this essay explores several quiltmaking techniques (such as English template piecing, cathedral window, and yo-yo) demonstrated by Wilson in the course of her program, as well as Wilson’s interest in the intersection of embroidery and quiltmaking,

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Erica Wilson and the Quilt Revival  »

By: Nancy Bavor

The Quilt Revival in the last decades of the twentieth century gave rise to new quilt-related professions and disciplines, including historians, collectors, shop owners, show organizers, appraisers, artists and makers, teachers, authors, and publishers. Often overlooked is the vital contribution quilt dealers played in bringing antique and vintage quilts to the marketplace, along with other quilt-related activities. Based on interviews conducted by the author from August 2011 to April 2013,

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Knockers, Pickers, Movers, and Shakers: Quilt Dealers in America, 1970–2000  »

By: Marin F. Hanson

This paper examines the phenomenon of “One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts” (OHGWQ), early 21st-century quilts made by American families to commemorate their adoption of a Chinese child. Since 1994, the single largest source for international adoptions in the United States has been the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, between 1999 and 2012, nearly 70,000 children of ethnic Chinese descent joined thousands of American families. During that same period,

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“One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts”: Expressions of Cross-Cultural Communication  »

By: Laurel Horton

Among the various quilted and embroidered white bedcovers surviving from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American collectors and curators have encountered curious woven textiles with designs of raised loops. Lacking an authoritative interpretive framework, these bewildered individuals offered a variety of interpretations for these distinctive weft-loop bedcovers. Recent research on a tradition of handwoven bedcovers produced in Bolton, Lancashire (UK), suggests that imported Bolton counterpanes produced a significant influence on both woven and embroidered counterpanes in the New Republic era and beyond.

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Weft-Loop Woven Counterpanes in the New Republic: The Rediscovery of a Textile Legacy  »

By: Joyce D. Hammond

Tīfaifai are colorful appliqué and piecework textiles of French Polynesia which, like similar regional Pacific forms with different names, originated during the early- to mid-nineteenth century from the combined influence of indigenous barkcloth traditions and introduced Western quilts. Today, Polynesian women (and some men) continue to create these highly valued and culturally important textiles. Over the past thirty years, the tīfaifai tradition has undergone efflorescence and significant transformation.

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Tīfaifai in Tahiti: Embracing Change  »