Quilts that inspire

This New York Beauty heirloom quilt was made
 in the 1860s and is featured on Page 60
of the book Florida Quilts.

I'm fresh from a visit to the American Quilter's Society Daytona Beach Quilt Week. I saw beautiful examples of fiber arts - both traditional piecework and art quilts - got inspired, and also got thinking about the threads of continuity that bind quilters.

The fiber arts today are a hobby for most enthusiasts and a career for some. I'm an experienced seamstress but a novice quilter, with one quilt, one star-themed block for the NASA quilt, and one table runner to my credit. (2022 update: I've reached intermediate quilt status, with several more done since I first wrote this post!) 

For women on the Florida frontier, quiltmaking was a necessity. Homemakers crafted bedcovers for family members and young women stitched quilts for their trousseaus. One such person was Sarah Asberry Brown Anderson.

Sarah's story is told in the 1992 book Florida Quilts, by Charlotte Allen Williams (University Press of Florida). Sarah lived in Wakulla County in North Florida when she started making the New York Beauty quilt pictured with this blog post. She was 12, and she dyed her homespun cotton fabric with tree bark solutions before cutting the pieces and hand-sewing the quilt. Sarah began the quilt in 1865 and finished it in 1869.

Williams writes that New York Beauty was a popular pattern in the late 1800s. Other designs popular in the late 19th century included:

• Friendship quilts that included embroidered signatures

• Log Cabin

• Irish Chain

• Album block quilts

• Crazy quilts

• Applique quilts that featured stylized flower designs

Sarah's descendants reported that she was proud of her New York Beauty quilt and preserved it through the years. One look at the photo and the level of craftsmanship is obvious. I'd be proud, too, if I'd cut and sewn together those hundreds of pieces into a beautiful finished whole. Having experimented with natural dyes, I can also attest to the quality of the fabric's colors.

The care given the New York Beauty is why it survived long enough to be documented in Florida Quilts. The book profiles some of the women and quilts uncovered during the Florida Quilt Heritage Project. That project, which I've written about before, did a remarkable job of bringing many women's lost stories back to life through their quilts.

Today, quiltmakers receive their just due and are credited for their work. The fiber arts are celebrated. This post is to pay homage to all the unsung needlewomen of the past.

View the Florida Quilt Project digital collection at The Quilt Index website. The Quilt Index is an open access digital repository.

Heirloom quilts: fabric, thread tell time

I wrote this 1987 newspaper article about
the documentation of Florida quilts.

I'm coming up against deadline to finish a quilt square for the NASA star-themed quilt project. The entry deadline is Aug. 1, 2014. When digging in my closet for complementary scraps of red, white and blue fabric, I was sidetracked by an old journalism portfolio that hadn't been opened in a while. In it were newspaper clippings of articles waiting to be pasted into a scrapbook. Old articles. Not quite antiques, but ... close. 

One was a 1987 story I wrote about a Florida Quilt Heritage Discovery Day at the library in New Smyrna Beach, a coastal city in Central Florida.

So, what does that have to do with Florida frontier? My young reporter self was fascinated with the stories told that day about the quilts brought in for documentation. I shared as many as I could in the article. 

Most of the quilts were family heirlooms sewn in the 19th century and early 20th century. And even though they belonged to Floridians in 1987, the quilts almost all originated somewhere else.

The quilts were beautiful, tangible evidence of the past. They illustrated the way people brought personal treasures that mattered when they migrated to Florida, whether they made the trek in 1880 or 1980. 

Homemade quilts, stitched with love, warmed both body and soul of new Florida settlers in need of roots.

More than 60 quilts were documented that day, including the following. The 1987 owners' names and relationship to the quiltmakers are in parentheses:

• red, white and green Mariner's Compass quilt, made in 1847 by Mary Ann Wilson in Pennsylvania (great-granddaughter Mrs. Newell Adams of Daytona Beach);

• a quilt made in Ohio in 1888 by Alice Hutchins, who sewed into it her own image in silk (grandson Bill Hutchins of Edgewater); 

• Mennonite quilt made by Mary Roth in 1920s in Nebraska, that included part of her 1892 wedding dress (granddaughter Kathy Meck of New Smyrna Beach);

• feathered-star pattern quilt made by Fannie Lord Grimshaw in 1901 in New York, and exhibited at the New York State Fair in 1975 (daughter-in-law Harriet Grimshaw of Daytona Beach).

Fannie made a deliberate mistake in her quilt because she said, as her daughter-in-law related, only God is perfect. Imperfections, to me, make quilts authentic, real ... human. They often outlive their makers and subsequent owners. The Quilt Heritage Day took place 27 years ago. Some of the quilts' then-owners may no longer be alive. But the quilts likely still exist.

View the Florida Quilt Project digital collection at The Quilt Index website. The Quilt Index is an open access digital repository.