Twelve Quilts of Christmas – #11

If you have followed along for the past 12 years, you know I will not easily post a picture of a quilt that is poor quality in either example or photography, so why am I posting this one? This quilt is an exception for a number of reasons. 

Featured on page 194 of American Quilts and Coverlets (by Safford and Bishop, 1974), they found the quilt very interesting for its primitive quality.  They wrote that “the heavy quilting in a broad wavelike design echoes the naïve feeling of the piece. 

I totally agree about its naïve quality in the quilting and this photo captures it beautifully.  However, the bold design executed with jaunty variations in motif placements adds a degree of sophistication that defies the primitive moniker.

I have an attachment to this grainy black and white photo for another reason.

The photo in the book was small, squished onto a page of other quilt photos and easily lost to the eye.  But this black and white photo of a tattered quilt wasn’t lost to the keen observation of Gwen Marston and her mentor and friend Mary Schafer.  Gwen wrote: “it had everything we look for in quilts: interesting quilting, bold shapes and eccentricity.  After many conversations with Mary Schafer about the quilt, speculating on the colours, studying the quilting, thinking about what kind of quilter might have made it, Mary drafted a pattern and started a copy of the quilt the same week we did.”  It was the first time they had seen quilting right across the applique with freehand fan concentric rings that were not marked but judged by eye for placement.

I recently had the opportunity to purchase Mary’s version of this quilt. I fondly remember phone calls with Gwen, where we would be looking through a particular book at the same time, discussing different quilts. I cherish those memories. I learnt so much from Gwen about studying antique quilts. I feel honoured to be the keeper, for now, of this piece of their story.

This is Mary Schafer’s version:

I love how Mary interpreted the outer border as two fabrics.  She honoured how the tulips are articulated as in the original and her proportions were fairly true to the original as well. She changed up the value of the tulips, but I think the stems, leaves and sashing are fairly true to the colour value in the original.

And this is Gwen’s version:

Gwen also interpreted how the tulips are articulated as in the original, but she changed up the colour and value distribution, as well as the proportion of the borders, and the finished size of the quilt.

Individual interpretations by each of them and I think both are grand successes! And doesn’t their quilting just make you swoon?

If you look at Mary and Gwen’s quilts you will notice that they have leaned towards a Baptist Fan quilting pattern with more rounded arcs. Now look at the original. Notice that the arcs have more of an angle to them, elbow quilting some call it. I have seen that in a lot of Southern quilts.

And although during my research I have only seen one other big single piece appliquéd tulip quilt (not to say there aren’t more out there) the other big tulip quilts that I saw were appliqués with more that one piece for the flower and they were predominantly from the south. So was this quilt made in Pennsylvania or did it travel there, or someone travelled there from the south and made it in Pennsylvania. Without proper provenance we will never know.

The old original inspiration quilt is no longer in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gwen discovered when she wrote to the museum. I can say that in all the quilts I looked at for this year, this one I find totally enchanting and I will totally admit it is partly because of Mary and Gwen’s story.  Wherever that old quilt has gone to, I am grateful those giant chunky tulips live on in their quilts.

What colours do you think the antique quilt was originally?  What do you see in the quilting design?  What kind of quilter do you think made it?