doppelgänger, y'all

The old applique quilt looked strangely familiar.

Don't you love it when you're looking for one thing and find something else? That's what happened the other day when I was looking through Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Appliqué. I was searching for designs related to the quilt in yesterday's blog post, but the images on page 84 stopped me in my tracks.

Design #16.68, "Cockscombs and Currants" looked identical to the design on the applique quilt I won in a South Carolina auction over the weekend. The source of the design was a quilt on page 46 of "The Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930" by Bets Ramsey and Merikay Waldvogel. I found my copy of the book, and sure enough, there it was-- a four-block rendition of the same exact design.

It's a doppelgänger, y'all! Jane Richey Morelock of Cleveland, Bradley County, Tennessee made the quilt in the book around 1870. That's the same circa date as the unidentified quilt from the auction in South Carolina. The location of the auction was Camden, which is more than 300 miles away from Morelock's home, Cleveland, Tennessee. Could the quilts be related? Were they made in the same place at the same time by the same hands?

Incidentally, another design from a quilt in my collection appears on the same page in Brackman's Encyclopedia of Appliqué. It is design #16.64 and is referred to as an "Oak Leaf Variant". It appeared on page 39 of "Kentucky Quilts, 1800-1900" from The Kentucky Quilt Project. The quilt was made around 1860 by Mrs. M.E. Poyner of Paducah, Kentucky.