By: Dana Fobes Bowne

The textile collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, includes an unusual embroidered quilt. A handwritten note in its file suggests that it was made in sixteenth-century England. However, the quilt’s motifs indicate that it is more likely a seventeenthcentury Bengali quilt. This paper describes the process to determine when and where the quilt was actually made and how it came to Spokane.

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“Old Quilt Brought to America”  »

By: Susan A. D. Stanley

In her lifetime, Mary Catherine Lamb (1949−2009) completed nineteen quilts, most of them vivid, eccentric portraits of saints, angels, and demonic creatures. Long separated from the faith of her childhood, Lamb believed that her combination of Catholic subjects and vintage textiles and oddments both honored and affectionately skewered her devout upbringing. Scholars speculate that the “disquieting edginess” and “saucy insouciance” of her work influenced the Studio Art Quilt establishment to keep Lamb at arm’s length.

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Mary Catherine Lamb: Lady of Perpetual Garage Sales  »

By: Colleen R. Hall-Patton

Like other art forms, quilting is a microcosm of its surrounding society. Thus, quilting is a possible place to find seeds of the women’s movement and active resistance to consumption. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, quilts slowly underwent a change in status in magazine articles from being understood as antiques and functional bedcoverings to being recognized as art forms worthy of exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City.

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Protofeminst Thought in Mid-Twentieth-Century Magazine Articles  »

By: Sandra Staebell

The Godey Quilt is a 1930s appliqué quilt composed of fifteen fabric portraits of men and women clothed in fashionable mid-nineteenth century attire. The dream of Mildred Potter Lissauer (1897−1998) of Louisville, Kentucky, this textile is a largely original design that is not representative of the majority of American quilts made during the early 1930s. Notable for the beauty and quality of its workmanship, the quilt’s crafting was,

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The Godey Quilt: One Woman’s Dream Becomes a Reality  »

By: Jonathan Gregory

In 1934, following a decade of personal losses and financial reversal, Ernest B. Haight (1899−1992) began quiltmaking, which he continued for the remainder of his productive years. As one who by nature and training focused on the process of making things as well as the aesthetics of what he made, Haight developed sew-then-cut and machine quilting approaches that increased the accuracy and efficiency of his quiltmaking. Quiltmaking fed his soul by providing a creative and practical activity that also satisfied his need for intellectual challenge,

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Why Ernest Haight Made Quilts  »

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  »