The Best of North Carolina, South Carolina and Beyond.

by Jan Snead

Fleur Bresler came by her love of quilts as a docent at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History. She caught the bug of quilt collecting and wanted to collect quilts representing the evolution of styles over our nation's history.

MMC+D Curator Melissa Post said that the collection is remarkable for its scope as well as the provenance (documentation) of each piece in the collection. The oldest quilts in American Quilt Classics feature white work (solid white quilt with stitch and embroidery details), indigo resist (a type of batik dyed with indigo), and chintz.

Mid-19th century styles include applique, stenciled, mosaic and album quilts. Chintz was an imported fabric and thus expensive, so women cut and appliqued the designs from chintz onto quilt tops or squares. Mosaics are built of tiny pieces stitched together. Some of these patterns were backed with paper, and you can tell the age of the quilt by examining fragments of the paper left in the quilt.

Album quilts became popular as non-corrosive inks made it possible to write on the fabric. Often album quilts were made by a group of friends or relatives to celebrate a marriage or the birth of child. Each person made and signed a quilt block, and the blocks were assembled into the finished quilt.

At right, Baltimore Album Crib Quilt, c.1850.

Late 19th century styles include log cabin, crazy and charm quilts. Ladies Home Journal, Hearth and Home and sewing periodicals provided patterns and instructions. Many women traded fabric scraps to get more variety of colors and patterns in their quilts. Log Cabin is a geometric pattern also known as Courthouse Steps, Barn Raising, Straight Furrows or Trip Around the World.

Crazy quilts and charm quilts are composed of thousands of irregular pieces. (You'd be crazy by the time you finished one?) Crazy quilts use many fabrics—you'll see pieces of Grandpa's suit or tie, Daddy's shirt and Granny's calico apron. Charm quilts were often made from exotic and expensive scraps of velvet, brocade and silk, usually embroidered and sometimes have small charms sewn onto the surface. The Victorian Crazy Quilt has embroidered fans, birds, lilies, and a little girl feeding a duck on it, as well as decorative stitch borders.

The Phoebe Warner Quilt is a design similar to a famous 1803 quilt made by Sarah Warner Williams for her cousin Phoebe, now owned by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is so heavily appliqued it looks like a painting, with a basket medallion in the middle and a pastoral farm scene below with an elaborate flower border. The Baltimore Album Quilt (c. 1852) by Catherine Bell Hooper is an excellent representation of the album style. It contains squares with bird, flower and wreath designs, all bordered by red and green bow swags.

Rare doll quilts and crib quilts show diversity of size and decorative techniques. My favorite is a doll quilt about the size of a bandana using velvet, lace and an odd political campaign fabric scrap (handkerchief? tobacco plug wrapper?)

The most recent quilts in the collection are Amish made in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. They are machine pieced and hand quilted, and are austere in design and simplicity. Color gradations of the fabrics are used to create light and shadow for interest.

Mrs. Bresler has assembled a marvelous collection, and we thank her for donating it to the Mint Museum. Mint Museums' public relation director Phil Busher says his favorite is the Victorian Crazy Quilt, because "it's colorful and unpredictable like myself." Mr. Busher also says this exhibit has attracted national attention. Southern Living has sent a photographer, and the Bresler collection will be featured in American Craft magazine.

For hours of operation of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, visit their website at www.mintmuseum.org

 

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