by Quilt Alliance | Mar 10, 2014 | On this Day in History Quilts series
On this day in 1926, the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection was published, “Lolly Willowes” (or “The Loving Huntsman”) written by English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner. The mail-order book seller started with 4,000 subscribers and in less than twenty years, the Club had more than 550,000 members. Norma Mossburg pieced and appliqued this top, titled “Persian Pickle” and Marilyn Lange quilted it in the summer of 2004. Mossburg had read the novel “Persian Pickle Club” about the members of a women’s quilt group. The quilt came out of a Block-of-the-Month activity. The quilt was documented as part of the Michigan Quilt Project in 2012. View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt. Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-book-of-the-month-club-selection-is-published http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Month_Club Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
by Quilt Alliance | Mar 9, 2014 | QSOS Spotlight
Feeling a little sleepy this morning? For many places in the world, last night was the start of Daylight Saving Time as we lose an hour ‘spring forward’ and skip ahead 60 minutes into the future. With time on our mind, today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features a clock quilt created by Barb Vlack as a meditation on slowly losing time. Barb shared with interviewer Karen Musgrave about the origins of her quilt and the symbolism of the clock it features: This is a quilt that has a distorted picture of a clock that is a representation of what I understand my mother drew when they gave her the Alzheimer’s diagnostic test that is called the Clox Test. It was developed by Dr. Clox and just by coincidence the whole premise is that you want to see if the patient can draw a clock. Well my mother could not, and you can see from this quilt that the circle that would outline the clock is very distorted, all of the numbers are nowhere near where they are supposed to be, it is very disorganized, and it illustrates how this test has turned out to be a diagnostic tool for determining whether a patient has lost some organizational skills, a symptom that is associated with Alzheimer’s degeneration. When I put together this quilt, I put the clock drawing on top of some pieced blocks called, “Time and Tide,” and I thought, ‘All right, we are losing time, my mother is losing time, and this was just one way to represent some of that.’ Actually, my father is losing time, too. When I told my dad about what was going on with my mom’s diagnosis (my mom and dad have been divorced for many years), he shook his head and told me he could not draw the clock either when he was given the Alzheimer’s diagnostic test. I am dealing with both my parents going through their Alzheimer’s journey. My mother lives alone, my father has a wife and they are a little bit different as far as their journeys, as far as what is going on. My mother cannot take the medication, my father can. So he is doing better. It was really an interesting thing to go through and make this quilt, because just the process of making it made me do a lot of thinking. There are memories that go into this. There are tears that go into it. There is symbolism that goes into it. How can I represent a lot of the things that go into our lives right now, or even went into our lives for years previous? It has been a difficult experience to realize that both of my parents are going to be going through this whole thing with Alzheimer’s, because there is nothing we can do about it. They are just going to have to take one day at a time and deal with it. And we’re running out of time… You can read more about Barb’s quilt, including how she selected the quilting pattern in her interview here. And you always can also read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance website. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
by Quilt Alliance | Mar 7, 2014 | On this Day in History Quilts series
On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his newest invention—the telephone. Bell was born in Scotland and first worked in London with his father, who developed a system to teach speaking to deaf people. In the 1870’s the family moved to Boston, where Bell started working on a device that would combine the telegraph and a record player so people could speak to each other from a distance. With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machinist, Bell developed a prototype that carried its first message three days after the patent was filed (beating the submission of a similar patent application by only 2 hours). This wool embroidered telephone quilt was made in 1930 by unknown quiltmakers in Clay County, Nebraska. The record states, “Quilt maker did not quilt it. Quiltmakers were friends or neighbors. Quilt pieced by three or more persons…Made for special person, Friend/Neighbor.” It appears to be a signature quilt although the record does not confirm this. The quilt was documented as part of the Nebraska Quilt Project in 1988. View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt. Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/alexander-graham-bell-patents-the-telephone Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
by Quilt Alliance | Mar 5, 2014 | On this Day in History Quilts series
On this day in 1963, the Hula-Hoop was patented by Arthur “Spud” Melin, co-founder of the Wham-O company. Melin and friend Richard Knerr, launched the company selling slingshots (that made the sound “Wham-O” when fired) to feed falcons used for hunting. A wooden hoop used in Australian schools for exercise and the hip-gyrating Hawaiian Hula dance inspired the idea for the Hula-Hoop. Wham-O sold an estimated 25 million of the plastic toys in its first four months of production. This quilt, titled “Enigma 3,” was born in Australia as well. Quiltmaker Mariya Waters of Melbourne, Australia made this machine quilted wholecloth wall piece in 2003, and it received 3rd place in the Miniature Quilts category at the American Quilter’s Society Quilt Show in Paducah, Kentucky. It is now part of the “Oh, Wow! Miniature Quilt Collection” of the National Quilt Museum, a collection of small quilts made to scale. Another very similar miniature quilt with the same title, made by Waters, is also documented in The Quilt Index. View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt. Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hula-hoop-patented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_hoop Posted by Amy E. Milne Executive Director, Quilt Alliance…
by Quilt Alliance | Mar 2, 2014 | QSOS Spotlight
Today’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight features an interview from one of my favorite projects, the Healing Quilts in Medicine Q.S.O.S., which interviewed quilt makers who created art quilts for the oncology waiting areas of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The theme of the quilts was the plants and animals used to make the medicine in chemotherapies. Today we’ll hear from Annabel Ebersole about the quilt she created, and the influence that living abroad had on her quilts–and herself. First, Annabel shared a bit about the quilt she made for the Healing Quilts in Medicine project: “Periwinkle Dreams” is a quilt that I made with a group of other quilt artists gathered together by Judy House. The quilts were destined to be hanging at Walter Reed in the cancer treatment area, and Judy had been ill with cancer and was treated at Walter Reed. Some of us were students of hers and some were nationally known quilters. We all chose a theme of plants or underwater sea creatures or some other form of natural substance that was being used for chemotherapy research and periwinkle apparently has been used. I know someone else made a large quilt with the periwinkle flower, but I was particularly drawn to making the flowers smaller, they are in the forefront of my quilt, and then there is this lovely garden hillside behind it and a blue sky and a tree and a fence and there is a little feeling of the pathway, two pathways running through the garden part. We met several times at Judy’s friend, Kay Lettau’s, house, and we would go there with different drawings of what we were going to be working on and kind of went around the circle and everyone talked about what they were going to do. Mine had warped from something else that was bigger into this particular style that just felt really right.” Annabel also shared some of the ways living abroad has shaped her visual interests, and the rest of her life… “We had a four-year tour in Portugal from 1980 to ’84 and from there we went to Brazil from ’84 to ’86, and then we were lucky enough to have four years in London. Starting with Portugal, the Portuguese have a long history; there are beautiful tile walls and floors that are there; there is lovely silver that is just exquisite; there are beautiful old castles; and there are some private homes and castles that have been made into hotels called Posadas. We arrived with an eighteen month old daughter and then had our second daughter when we lived in Portugal, so when Bruce and I were able to get away for a weekend we would go to different Posadas and kind of explore that area. Even having one night away was really golden for us. [laughs.] The girls were great travelers, and we would drive regularly up from the Lisbon area up to Sintra, which is a hillside castle with a town at the base of the castle. We went further north toward Porto and outside of Porto there is an incredible Iron Age village called Citania de Briteros that kind of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It is just these huts with little kind of walkways with gutters in them and at the time there was a man who lived there who was the caretaker but it didn’t have a lot of protection the way you would think something would that is kind of a national treasure. They also had Roman ruins in Portugal, and we really enjoyed seeing mosaics and other evidences of the Roman presence, and Coimbra had this beautiful library. I think I’ve always been fascinated with architectural details. I’ll spring forward to London because that is one place where we really visited several stately homes. I was able to take a survey course of different periods, like the Georgian Period. We would learn about some of the art, the architecture, the gardens, the silver, everything from that period with just a little short history of who was the king, and what was going on in terms of political intrigue or whatever. We would visit the Victoria and Albert Museum and I think this class lasted probably three or four months. It was down in Kensington and that was a real highlight for me. I have always loved the skylines; the rooflines in England are just fascinating and if you go to a castle and you are able to look at some of the chimney pots that are intricately decorated, these brick chimney pots that swirl around or they have a step like effect in them. Then you think of seeing a roofline and chimneys in Holland and you realize that there are some similarities that cross over and you are reminded of all the explorers. The Portuguese certainly got around everywhere, and the quality of learning the history and having lived in Europe was fascinating. When we were posted in Brazil I was involved with the American Women’s Club and we helped to start a nursery school in an orphanage. There was amazing poverty in Brasilia. The capitol itself is middle class and then there are some very, very wealthy people there. In the outlying satellite cities it can be extremely poor. We were invited to visit our, well we went to one wedding of a very working class family and were invited to another one and really got to see how the other half lived and visiting the orphanage was an eye opener. Through the American Women’s Club, we raised money for wheelchairs for people who lived in just poverty stricken areas. I came back with just a huge awareness of how fortunate Americans are and how much we have. ” You can read more quilt stories on the Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories page on the Quilt Alliance website. Posted by Emma Parker Project Manager, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories…
