Laura

Today I learned Laura Fisher passed away this week. She was a quilt dealer living in New York City, and I was never fortunate enough to meet her, but we'd been in touch for probably 20 years. We have two quilts that came from Laura.

The first one was made around the turn of the century and it is a red, white and blue one-patch in a blending zig-zag design reminiscent of Bargello. It is exceptionally modern for a quilt that's over 100 years old.

The second quilt is well known to quilt experts and anyone else who has seen Bob Shaw's memorable book. The quilt is on the cover. It is velvet and has a fan design arranged in a medallion style. Unique! 

The quilt world mourns the loss of Laura Fisher. I'm very sad we never connected that last time I was in New York. I remember speaking to her on the phone shortly after 9/11, and I felt like we were old friends. Thanks to Laura for finding so many remarkable quilts. She was a beacon, and her legacy is deep.

coming soon - epic pieced scrap quilt top from Oregon

 
Last week we were on a quilt selling spree. Nine quilts will soon be on their way to new homes. But we're always looking, and while browsing we found this gem and had to have it. 

It's a large crazy quilt top made of cotton fabrics from the 1930s to the 1950s. The top is foundation pieced on plain cotton muslin fabric and each patch is outlined with black decorative stitching. Dimensions are 89" x 75". Here are some photos.

Wow, what a stunner. It's coming from an estate in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, which is slightly southeast of Eugene. Can't wait to see it in person!

looking at quilts in a new way

we loved this quilt but sold it two days after we found it

We love quilts and have a lot of them. Many were featured in print publications, magazines and books. We always felt the quilts gained a little something by being published. They were famous in their own way, so we needed to hold on to them. 

A favorite quilt from "Modern Roots" - sold.

Now we're looking at these quilts in a new way, or maybe we're seeing them the same way from a different angle. We always wanted people to enjoy them, but didn't sell many. Maybe it was time. 

Scrappy 'Stacked Bars' quilt from Modern Roots - for sale on Etsy

Over the last couple years, we started picking up quilts at thrift shops and reselling them in a booth at Antique Alley, a local antiques and vintage co-op here in Portland. A lot of these quilts were made in the last 20 years, in good condition, and some were even mass produced. It didn't matter. People wanted them. They also wanted to repurpose handmade quilts in poor condition, so they bought those-- plus antique and vintage quilt blocks and tops.

Published quilts are different, though. We want people to know where they've been, so we have to find a way to transfer that information. 

T-shaped quilt from New Hampshire, available now on Etsy

Maybe it's be OK let other people enjoy them, in the cloth. Maybe our friends out there in the world need the quilts as much as we did when we first found them. Maybe our work is done, and it's time to let go and share the love.

1930s Double Wedding Ring, available soon!

The quilts don't need to be archived any longer. They don't need to be in storage, waiting for us to do something else with them. We are plucking them out of storage one by one and offering them up. There are a few in our Etsy shop, but we sometimes post on Facebook before listing them. It's easy and direct, and sometimes we already know the people who may want to buy a quilt.

Our Etsy shop is called Vintage House PDX, and we'll be listing quilts, jewelry and other objects. you can also find us on Facebook and at Antique Alley, 2000 NE 42nd Avenue, lower level in case #36 and booth C-1 in Portland. Antique Alley is open 11am-5pm Monday through Saturday. We thank our friends for helping us look at quilts in a new way, and we appreciate your support in our quilt rehoming effort.

modern ideas in an old quilt

 

detail of mid-19th century quilt from Baltimore

We love seeing signs of modernism in old quilts. This mid-19th century quilt came from an eBay seller in Baltimore some time around 2006. 

Its large, concentric square and bullseye medallion design is incredibly modern, which is why we included the quilt in our second book, "Modern Roots, Today's Quilts from Yesterday's Inspiration" (C&T/Stash, 2016). The patchwork design is a big part of the picture, but there's much more to this quilt.

The quilting is simply exquisite. It could've been featured in the following book, which was full of free-motion quilting designs inspired by very old quilts. But it wasn't. We wanted a completely different group of quilts, so regrettably we didn't showcase the quilting of this masterpiece.

Beautiful, double-row quilting in botanical designs is balanced by striking grid quilting in the red. The dense echo quilting in the center medallion makes us weak in the knees.

Today's machine quilters work with similar methods, filling areas with varied types of quilting for contrast and visual interest. This remarkably modern old quilt has such incredible details, we thought it was worth another look. Thank you for visiting our blog. We hope you enjoyed the photos.

Farewell, 2020. Hello 2021!

 

Large glass paperweight with controlled bubbles, Barbini Oggetti, Murano

I didn't blog much in 2020. It was kind of an unusual year: our first year married and the first time we needed to be quarantined, socially distanced and masked-up in public. It was such an unusual year, we barely bought a single quilt. 

amber carnival glass deviled egg plate - sold!

We did collect other things in 2020, mostly for resale. We like shopping at thrift stores, among the few places open to offer us a little retail therapy, and of course the experience would not be complete without mask-fogged glasses and bottles of hand sanitizer. 

silver plated Revere bowls

We posted some of our finds on Facebook and even sold a few things, but our online shop is still in the planning stages. We also sell at a local shop called Antique Alley in the Hollywood District of Portland. We have had a booth a and a locked case there, and will soon move to an unlocked, fully lit case closer to our booth. 

costume jewelry / necklace - sold!

One of the best finds of the year was the large glass paperweight, attributed to Barbini Oggetti of Murano, pictured at top. Comparable examples sell in the $600-800 range, and we got ours for $6.99. We'll hang on to that one, and a few other things such as a Bundt cake pan and like-new Rubbermaid water cooler. 

large acrylic painting, on sale now at Antique Alley

We're reselling most everything else, primarily for the fun of it, but maybe we'll make a couple bucks, too. So, as we say farewell to 2020 and hello to 2021, we look forward to the thrill of the hunt, and certainly all the great people we'll meet along the way. We wish everyone a happy, healthy New Year and hope to see you soon!

Crossroads revisited

In 2016 I co-authored an article for Blanket Statements, the newsletter of the American Quilt Study Group with Marian Ann Montgomery, Curator of Clothing and Textiles at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Today I was rereading the article after posting it to Barbara Brackman's QuiltHistorySouth Facebook group, and discovered errors in the descriptions of the block structures of two quilts. 

The original (PDF) can be found on the academia.edu web site, click here. Here is the corrected and revised article.

Cross Roads to Bachelor’s Hall
By Marian Ann J. Montgomery, Ph.D., and Bill Volckening
The uncanny similarities between two quilts in the collection at the Museum of Texas Tech University and a quilt appearing in Quilters Newsletter led to collaborative research, with a focus on dating quilts using published pattern sources and physical attributes.

When the December/ January 2016 issue of Quilters Newsletter was released, a quilt on page 17 caught the attention of Marian Ann Montgomery, Curator of Clothing and Textiles at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Montgomery was in the midst of planning an exhibition and catalogue, and two of the Museum’s quilts, one in the exhibit and another recent acquisition, were remarkably similar to the one in the magazine. 

Montgomery came across one of the quilts during an inventory in 2014. It is red, white and light blue, 73 inches by 84.25 inches, and it has a modern looking design with square blocks forming a secondary circular design with a blue square cornerstone in the center of each circle. There are 16 blocks and four half blocks along the upper edge. Each block is approximately 16 and 1/2 inches by 16 and 1/6 inches. (See Figure 1)

In 2015, Linda Fisher from Lubbock, Texas, donated an almost identical quilt. It is also red and white with a light blue that is a deeper hue than the first quilt, and red circles rather than blue squares at the cornerstone point of each block. It is 79 inches wide and 90 inches long with the same number of blocks and half blocks as the first quilt. Each block is approximately 17 inches square. (See Figure 2)

Both quilts came with only bits of information. The first quilt was donated to the museum by the grandson of the maker. The donor had passed away; there were no other descendants to contact, but his obituary provided the full name of both of his parents. Pat Grappe, a volunteer and trained historian who regularly does research for the Clothing and Textiles Division, found more information about the first quiltmaker, and a family group photo that included her.

Olive Pearl Wigley, the maker of the first quilt, was born on August 3, 1885, in Hunt, Texas. Census records showed her residence as Fannin County, east of Dallas, in 1900. She married Robert Pickney Price on August 8, 1905, in Honey Grove, Texas, which is also in Fannin County. By 1910 she was living in Michell County, Texas, which is west of Abilene and south of Lubbock. She remained in Michell County, likely on a ranch, until she moved into Colorado City, a town in Michell County, sometime in the 1920s. Her husband died on July 12, 1948, and she lived on until May 13, 1974.

The quilt donated by Fisher is actually a time-span quilt, a vintage top finished recently. A friend of Fisher’s purchased the top for 25 dollars at a garage sale in a “large sprawling house between Indiana and University and the Loop and 82nd Street” in Lubbock, Texas, and Fisher quilted it.

Cross Roads to Bachelor’s Hall is pattern number 2946 in the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman, and is attributed to Clara Stone. The pattern appeared in Practical Needlework: Quilt Patterns, published in 1906 by C.W. Calkins & Company in Boston. The booklet was one of a series containing patterns originally designed by Clara Stone for periodicals published by Vickery and Hill Company in Augusta, Maine.

Based on the life dates of the maker of the first quilt and when the pattern was published, a circa date of 1915 seemed reasonable for both of the quilts in the Museum of Texas Tech collection. The quilt in Quilters Newsletter had a much earlier date—1870. At first, it seemed improbable since 1870 was much earlier than the Clara Stone pattern. The red, white, and green quilt was part of The Volckening Collection of Portland, Oregon. (See Figure 4)

“The quilt came from a seller in Texas,” said Volckening, who initially thought the quilt was made even earlier based on its physical attributes. “I have seen a couple examples from Tennessee, and I thought it was possible the quilt could’ve been made in Tennessee originally and migrated to Texas, but it was found in Texas. The colors are over-dyed green (faded) and worn Turkey red. The name Cross Roads to Bachelor’s Hall is the earliest published name I could find for it.”

Dimensions are 76 inches by 94 inches, and each of the 20 blocks was 18 inches square. The thin, cotton quilt is densely quilted, chaff visible in the batting, with a fine, quarter-inch applied white binding matching all the other white fabric. The quilt has a patina. Fabrics show signs of fading, deterioration and yellowing. The methods of construction and signs of age offer more information worth considering about the quilt. Was it plausible to think it predated the earliest published patterns by more than a quarter century?

Two related examples from Tennessee, found by Volckening on the Quilt Index, had circa dates between 1880 and 1890. Callie Burnett and Laura White of Pelham, Grundy County, Tennessee, made one quilt with solid red, white and blue fabrics. The dimensions were 62.5 inches by 80 inches, and family date was 1883. The second quilt was red, white and green, made in Winchester, Tennessee, around 1890. No maker’s name or life dates were available, but the great aunt of the owner made it. The quilt was 68.5 inches by 92 inches. 

Merikay Waldvogel, co-author of The Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930, commented on the difficulty dating quilts with all solid colors. Waldvogel said the fabrics in Volckening’s quilt “seemed to be the 1850s green—that lemony shade.” Volckening describes the Turkey red as having a cool tone and shows color loss and deterioration consistent with fabrics of the middle nineteenth century.

“Determining age is a matter of finding enough reliable clues in the quilt to build a case for a date,” said Barbara Brackman in her seminal book Clues in the Calico, A Guide to Identifying and Dating Antique Quilts. Quilts served as inspiration for pattern designers of early twentieth century, and some designs existed for decades before they were published. It is not unheard of to find quilts that predate the earliest published patterns. Volckening’s New York Beauty Collection includes 70 quilts, 24 of which were made before the earliest published pattern representing the motif.

Cross Roads to Bachelor’s Hall was a much less common pattern than New York Beauty, and there were far fewer examples to study. Kansas City Star published the same pattern as Cross Roads in 1931 and Wagon Wheels in 1941; and Capper’s Weekly also published a Cross Roads pattern, but very few quilts surfaced with the design. One sold at auction by Blanchard’s Auction Service in Potsdam, New York, in 2012 and Jan Magee recently found one in an antiques mall.

The research process for these quilts shed light on the importance of knowing when a pattern was first published, who made the quilt, the maker’s life dates, and how the physical characteristics aligned with the pattern publication information. The estimated dates for the two quilts in the Museum of Texas Tech University were close to the earliest publication date of the pattern, but the date for the quilt from the Volckening Collection was supported more by the clues in the cloth. 

In the end, all the dates checked out, and Montgomery successfully launched her exhibition and published the catalogue. Volckening soon will publish his second book, Modern Roots: Today’s Quilts from Yesterday’s Inspiration, and it will include a pattern and a twenty-first century rendition of the design. Perhaps we will see more of these quilts in the future. 

what to do?

maybe I will write another book

I'm not really bored, but a new project could be fun right now. Maybe I will write another book.

my first book

My first book is all about a complex American patchwork design known as "New York Beauty" (Quiltmania/France 2015). I wrote the book and did all the photography in the summer of 2014. It was a big project, but it only took me two months to complete. The book summarized 25 years of collecting the spiky-curvy design and its variants, so that's how long the project really took.

my second book

My second book, "Modern Roots" (C&T/Stash 2016) focuses on modernism in American patchwork. It's primarily a project book and includes inspiration quilts from my collection made between 1840 and 1970. Although I have never used a pattern to make a quilt, the publishers had a whole team working on the patterns and instructions. They did a fabulous job.

our book, my third

The third book, "Inspired Free-Motion Quilting" (C&T/Stash 2018) is co-authored with Mandy Leins, who created stunning free-motion quilting designs inspired by masterpiece quilts made between 1790 and 1870. The quilts represent an elegant period of American quiltmaking, and the book is a masterpiece in its own right, largely due to Mandy's significant contribution.

I would love to publish an "official" book about the quilts of the 1970s

Those are my three official books, but quilts from the collection appear in dozens of other books and I have also self-published several books using Blurb. I did a big 1970s book a few years ago. It needs updating. I want to do a big book of the whole collection. It's hard to know where to begin. I suppose, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "There will be time, there will be time"