Archives for October 2014

Tracing the Patterns

October 21, 2014 by Janneken

MMbutton — Buy this book! It’s gorgeous!

Like most first time quiltmakers, when I first began making a quilt—one summer vacation as a teenager—I turned to tried and true traditional patterns. But beginning with that first quilt, a sampler based on one of those early 1980s books on how to make a sampler quilt, I took these old patterns and did what I could to make them my own. I adapted Squares in squares, Split Nine Patches, Chinese Coins, Crossed Canoes, and perhaps my very favorite: Jacob’s Ladder.

Each quilt shares a long lineage with the many quilts that came before it, and helps usher in the many that will come after. I love that Michele Muska’s new book, Quilting the New Classics helps make those connections among quilts for us. Most books about making quilts don’t attempt to cross the supposed divisions between “traditional” and “modern” quilting, let alone art quilts and antiques. But we get all of the above from Michele, in part, I think because she is an individual that transcends these groups as well. Whether we’re traditionalists or modernists, curators, scholars, artists, quilters, or crafters, we all love Michele. I personally thank Michele for inviting me to contribute a forward to her new book.

jacob's ladder_small — My second quilt, a variation of Jacob’s Ladder. A little proto-Modern, no? Displayed how I prefer my quilts: on a bed. This one I set up in a big quilt frame in my college house my senior year. I encouraged friends to take some stitches, but sometimes had to pull them out after they left the quilting frame. Dated 1998.

As I flip through Quilting the New Classics, I’m reminded of my own connections to some of these patterns, and how the quilts I know and love relate to this grander tradition that continues to be alive and thriving today.

Double Wedding Ring_small — I had no idea how dang hard this would be! Double Wedding Ring for Steve and Krista Yutzy-Burkey, dated 1999.

Out of love, but perhaps foolishly, I made a queen size double wedding ring quilt for my first two dear friends that married each other. Bad precedent. And a blanket apology to all friends who’ve gotten hitched since and have not received one.

I am most drawn to the Amish version of crazy quilts, particularly the wild ones made by women from Arthur, Illinois, early in the 20th century. They may not have embellished like Allie Aller, but they went over the top in their own ways.

6.1_Crazy_Wheatcroft — Crazy Quilt by Mattie Mast Kauffman, c. 1910-20. Arthur, Illinois. Cotton and wool. 71 x 80 in. Image courtesy of David Wheatcroft and Eve Granick

*Selina and the Bear Paw Quilt*, by Barbara Smucker (no, she’s not my mom, honest!) and illustrated by Janet Wilson

Lately, when I think of the Bear Paw pattern, I picture little Selina, the Mennonite heroine of Selina and the Bear Paw Quilt, which has become a bedtime favorite among the four-year-old-set at my house. Civil War era Selina takes a Bear Paw quilt top pieced by her grandmother with her when her family moves to Canada to avoid the coming war.

Although Bonnie Bus’s amazing nine patch she titled Oscillation (Quilting the New Classics, page 86) may be my new favorite, I also think of the nine patch in strips quilt I wrote a paper about in grad school from the collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Musuem—my first in-depth analysis of a quilt.

fussy cut — Detail, Grandmother’s Flower Garden, by my Great-Grandmother Mary Hostetler Beechy, c. 1950. Fussy! Fussy!

While Hexagon quilts predate the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt we all know and well, that is still the version I’m most drawn to, specifically the one often on a guest bed at my parents’ home, made by my great-grandmother Mary Hostetler Beechy, with the most ridiculous fussy cutting imaginable.

My family did not, however, make Yo-Yo quilts. Prior to knowing Michele and her passion for Yo-Yos, I tended to question the sanity of anyone who might make such a quilt. I did however, fall in love with Roderick Kiracofe’s Yo-Yo quilt featured in his new Unconventional and Unexpected, with Yo upon Yo stitched on a huge sheet, with beautiful surprising appliquéd flowers peaking through.

Rail Fence was one of the patterns in that sampler quilt book I started with many years ago. A very humble block in this pattern graces that quilt first quilt, which I still sleep under every night, even though Mark Lipinski told me I needed to stop and save it for my daughter. Sorry, Mark. And sorry, Calla.

Please enjoy posts by other contributors to this lovely book:

October 20: Michele Muska
October 21: Leslie Tucker Jenison
October 23: Valerie Bothell
October 24: Kaari Meng
October 25: Elisa Sims Albury
October 26: Heather Jones
October 27: Victoria Findlay Wolfe
October 28: Amy Smart
October 29: Jackie Kunkel
October 30: Pat Sloan
October 31: Shelly Pagliai
Nov 1: Allie Aller
Nov 2: Kristin Omdahl
Nov 3: Jaquie Gering
Nov 3: Listen to Michele on Pat’s Sloan’s The Voice of Quilting Podcast from American Patchwork and Quilting, 4:00 pm eastern

Also, stay tuned for some great inspiration and ideas from some of our contributors’ newsletters and social media platforms!
Meg Cox with Quilt Journalist Tells All
New York times Best Selling Author Marie Bostwick
Megan Frock of Downtown Housewife

And more from Marci Elmer Warren, Linda Pumphrey, Bonnie Bus and Darlene Zimmerman!

Just What I’d Expect from Roderick Kiracofe

October 15, 2014 by Janneken

I had the pleasure of interviewing Roderick for my research for Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon about his role as a quilt dealer in the 1980s. Although Kiracofe and Kile did not specialize in Amish quilts, they bought and sold many of them, and convinced corporate buyers of their significance. In fact, the first substantial article I read about the Esprit Amish quilt collection was by Michael Kile, published in the 1983 Quilt Digest. The accompanying images of Esprit’s corporate headquarters filled with Amish quilts helped me build my argument about Esprit’s vital role in the promotion of quilts as art objects.

Advertisement for Kiracofe and Kile, placed in The Clarion in 1981.

Over 20 years since those early days of quilt dealing, Roderick began to think about quilts again, particularly that unwritten rule that no good quilts were made after 1950. With the assistance of eBay, he discovered an untapped treasure trove of these forgotten quilts, the ones that American quiltmakers continued to make even after the heyday of the twentieth century’s first quilt revival, and into the second (ongoing) revival. Roderick’s eye was as good as ever, now tuned in to the graphic playfulness, unexpected fabrics and colors, and rule breaking that some quiltmakers in the second half of the twentieth century seemed to embrace.

Kiracofe chatting about a few of his quilts at American Quilt Study Group seminar, Milwaukee, September 2014.

Roderick has amassed an amazing collection that he has now shared with a lucky viewing public in Unconventional and Unexpected: Quilts Below the Radar, 1950-2000 (STC Craft, Melanie Falick Books, a division of Abrams). Unlike the all-star collections of an earlier generation dominated by pristine master quilts such as Baltimore Albums, high-style chintzes, and Amish center diamonds, this collection features quilts you might even imagine sleeping under—the kind of quilts your grandma maybe had, if your grandma didn’t like to play by the rules. These quilts recycle fabrics, integrate unexpected scraps (the negative space left from cutting trouser legs, the acetate lining from a hat, polyester double knits in every shape and color imaginable), and surprise us with innovation and quirkiness (does that cat have a mustache? Is it smoking?). They induce laughter, wonder, and amazement.

I am thankful that Roderick bothered to ask, “What sorts of quilts were people making in the second half of the 20^th century?” Like all collectors, his resulting collection does not account for the full array of quiltmaking practices, but it focuses on a certain unheralded subset: quilts by makers who didn’t care about published patterns, interior design trends, or juried competitions.

These quilts have also changed the way I think about quiltmaking. In my academic study of quilts, I learned that in contrast to the commonly understood “scrap-bag myth,” American quiltmakers did not usually make quilts out of scraps of old clothing but instead usually bought new fabric for this purpose. I think that by the mid-twentieth century, Americans commonly believed this myth of piecing quilts together from scraps of fabric to keep one’s family warm to the extent that many women in fact began recycling old fabrics into quilts, embracing the myth as reality as it allowed them to creatively create something out of nothing.

Roderick Kiracofe and Janneken Smucker sharing a moment in front of approximately one billion yo-yos at American Quilt Study Group seminar, September 2014.

Unconventional and Unexpected not only is gorgeous in its design—the top notch photography by Sharon Risedorph and Josef Jacques makes these quirky quilts just glow, as does the design by Sara Gifford—but it also proves to be a delight to read. Roderick’s introduction sets the stage by contextualizing the quilts within his own personal story, and then 10 essays by artists, curators, quiltmakers, and scholars (including “Unconventional Wisdom: The Quilts and Myths that Came Before,” by yours truly—thank you so much, Rod, for the invitation) provide a diverse array of perspectives on these objects. I hope you join me in looking, reading, and thinking, and then behold these quilts as completely unexpected, yet just what you’ve been looking for.

Goin’ North Update

October 7, 2014 by Janneken

It’s October, and our students in HIS 601/HON 452 are continuing their progress on our Goin’ North project focused on the first Great Migration of African Americans to Philadelphia. Last week they submitted their OHMS Level 3 Indexes, adding chapter segments to each of their assigned oral history interviews. For each chapter segment, they created metadata including title, segment synopsis, keywords, and a partial transcript. And then they layered in media–images that appear in a lightbox, hyperlinks to resources for further reading, and GPS coordinates to the places the narrators describe. As William Steffens recalls sneaking past the white workers at the shipyard in Jacksonville, Florida, as he attempted to hop a ship north, we see a vintage postcard of the Jacksonville docks. When Ruth Hayre recounts how her grandfather helped start one of the first African American owned banks in Philadelphia, we see a 1929 article from The Philadelphia Tribune titled “Negro Banks Great Help to Business Man.” When Walter Gay remembers the first house his family moved to in Philadelphia, we can open a Google map showing the address.

Merchants and Miners Docks in Jacksonville, Florida. In his interview, William Steffens explains how it was from a dock adjacent to these that he escaped North by boat.

These indexes are still a work in progress. We knew we needed a controlled vocabulary for keywords since we have 21 students working individually, so we spent many hours honing our list of terms. And then we realized we hadn’t developed a standardized mode for crediting the images used in the lightbox. So we’ve determined some best practices for style. Some interviewees, like Ruth Hayre, have donated their family’s archives to local repositories and have an abundance of primary sources to which students can link. Others moved north to work as domestic servants, earning money to give their children opportunities, but leaving behind little paper trail. Students working with less documented interviewees have to be more creative, uncovering sources like newspaper articles with tips for housekeeping or GPS coordinates to their employer’s home.

Up next: we’re creating short exhibits on each interviewee in Omeka. The challenge is brevity. We’ve asked students to write a biography of their interviewee in 500 words or less. Writing in tight, accessible prose, they will find, can be harder than churning out a 15 page term paper at the end of the semester. But I suspect those 500 words will be much more satisfying for our students to write and for me (and you) to read.