Whose quilt block? It's Mine

Yesterday I took a great stack of quilts to my Country Women's Association meeting to talk about antique quilts. It was great, I love talking about my collection and I got excellent feedback.  I showed a number of friendship quilts and explained how I track down the women who made each quilt block.  

Some quiltmakers were very thoughtful, adding a full name, a location or even a date.  Other blocks remain a mystery.

Hope of Hartford

This block is "Mine". It belongs to the Sugar Creek Township quilt top, made between 1942 and 1945 in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.  Mine is in the centre top row so it may have been the person who organised the whole quilt.  Two rows down is the block "Mother."  My assumption is that Mother is the recepient of the quilt, and the two signatures have been done by the same person; the capital M's are the same.

Dresden Plate

I found an advertisement for a quilt pattern catalogue with the Hope of Hartford pattern.  This catalogue was published by the Farmers' Journal / Farmers' Wife magazine (1877 - 2015).  There was an annual quilt feature in either January or February.  This is from the February 1945 magazine, courtesy archive.com. The catalogue was 10c, patterns were 10c each or 3 for 25c.

 

 Hope of Hartford - 12" pieced block.  The original is in pink, green and white.

 

Mine has chosen to stick to the suggested pink, green and white.  Interestingly, the design directly underneath the Hope of Hartford on the catalogue page is Twin Darts, also a block in the same quilt. Maybe the Sugar Creek Township quilt is closer to 1945 than to the earlier date of 1942.

Twin Darts

This Week's 1930s Block - Straight to Your Inbox

If you follow me on Facebook  you already know about the daily 1930s block.  Block #250 Little Boy's Britches was shared today - hurray! - and there are more to come.

 

Day 246 - Dresden Plate Quilt - This dainty block, the Dresden Plate, is pieced of twenty different prints and appliqued on a plain block fourteen inches square. A pillow top in this design may be made any size desired, or it may be used for chair pads. A silk design may be applied upon woolen blocks if one cares to use these fabrics. The many uses of this block is one of tests of the homemakers' ingenuity. In small motifs it may be the corner decoration of bedroom curtains or a single block may be the front of a child's scrapbook with the name in the center.

Kansas City Star, September 2, 1931.

 

Now it's time for something new! 

 

My new project is This Week's 1930s Block and it arrives as an email link to any email address.  There will be photos of the block with  background information.  Also included is a six-inch pattern of the block so you can recreate it is you like.  No cost and you can cancel when you like. The signup form is below:

Yes please! Add me to the list!

 

Don't delay - the first block Little Beech Tree is waiting for you!

Friends, Please Bring a Dresden Plate

Dresden Plate is the most familiar name for this block but other traditional names are Aster, Friendship Ring and Sunflower.

The pattern wasn't well known until the late 1920s.  Ruby McKim calls it Friendship Ring.  Her pattern has twenty petals and she suggests a quilt border of individual petals.  It is a Friendship Ring because 'one usually has to call upon many friends for a proper assortment' of different patterned materials.

This is a 12 inch block.  I traced the petals onto washaway applique sheets, ironed each petal onto the fabric and hand stitched like English paper piecing.  The washaway will soften with washing (the package says).

This is a 6 inch block with five petals in each corner.  My inspiration was from a 1930s signature quilt made in Ohio.

The Ohio quilt has a Dresden plate block in each corner and proves that you can have as many petals as you like.

12 Pointy Petals

15 Feedsack Petals

16 Circular Petals

17 Dressmaking Scraps

More information on the Dresden Plate block history can be found at:

http://www.patternsfromhistory.com/colonial_revival/dresden-plate.htm

Nina Elliott School Teacher

Are you ready for another chapter?  Good, so am I. 

Not all women in the 1930s were stay at home housewives.  The Malaga quilt makers were teachers, bookkeepers, fruit packers, factory workers, a milliner and farmers.

Nina Elliott ~ Dresden Plate

Nina May Elliott was a school teacher when she made her Dresden Plate quilt block.  Nina was single of course - married women didn't teach school.  Nina had a three year college degree, probably from a teachers' college.  Teaching and nursing were two areas in which women were encouraged to participate.  Nina taught at a number of schools and shared a house with another female teacher.

Nina's mother Mildred Love Elliott was also a teacher.  Mildred's mother and stepfather took the family to stake a homestead claim in Del Rio, Washington.  In the 1900 census Mildred was 18 years old and teaching, most likely in a one room school.  No tertiary qualifications were needed for Mildred, she would have gone straight into a teaching job after finishing school - some of her students would be almost as old as she was.  The school opened one term at a time when the parents could afford the teacher's salary.  Miss Love might have boarded with a school family or may have had her own teacher's residence.

School teacher’s cabin in Marlboro, Alberta, Canada, 1930.

Photo legacy of Helen A. Dineen, Wikimedia Commons

Nina Elliott left the teaching profession at the age of 28 to marry Merton Love, her mother Mildred's cousin.  Merton was a hardware salesman, twenty years Nina's senior and had been widowed for five years.  Nina became stepmother to Merton's two teenage children and had two more children of her own.  Nina didn't enjoy good health and died in 1953 at the age of 41.

Mildred Elliott survived her daughter Nina.  Mildred resumed teaching while here children were at high school.  Mildred must have returned to study; in the 1940 census she has completer five years of tertiary education - perhaps she had her master's degree in education?  Mildred outlived her daughter Nina by 28 years and survived to celebrate her 100th birthday.


Postscript: Most of the women from the Malaga quilt were born in the USA but their parents were immigrants.  Nina Elliott is an exception, at least on her mother's side of the family.  Nina's g-g-g-g-grandfather Robert Love enlisted with the Rhode Island troops as a sergeant in 1777.