Wonders of a Patchwork Quilt - Montreal, 1932

The following is the memory of an anonymous writer of their grandmother's amazing quilt.  Published in the Montreal Star (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) on July 23, 1932 it describes an amazing gigantic bed-quilt full of family memories - for better or worse.

 

 

 

 

 

Patchwork quilts are said to be very fashionable.  Dealers are searching remote country districts in an endeavor to find real old quilt such as gentlewomen used to sew long ago.

Will they ever unearth anything half so wonderful as grandma’s special quilt, which she used sometimes to show us on a Sunday afternoon, if we had been extra good?  We ranged in age from eleven years to two and a half, but that spectacle never failed to thrill us.

There was a ritual about the very unpacking.  The quilt, being too wonderful to use, spent its life embalmed in a large drawer in grandmama’s bedroom.

First, dust sheets were taken off and folded, and moth balls fell to the floor.  Then many sheets of newspaper were unwrapped, as a friend had advised grandmama that moths could not abide the ink of the printing house.  Next were several layers of tissue paper of a lovely violet hue; we children used to try to abstract one or two unnoticed, while pretending to help.

 

A GORGEOUS QUILT

 

How shall I describe the glories of the quilt itself when we feasted our eyes on it finally?  It would have been too large for a modern bed, but fitted the immense French bedstead favored by grandmama and grandpapa.

The underside was a dark red silk, with a generous frill of the material surrounding it.  The silk was fine, yet firm, and elongated diamonds of tiny stitches kept it attached to the wadding inside, which was not wadding at all, but eiderdown, collected by one of our great-uncles during a world tour.

The upper side consisted of a regular pattern of light flowers embedded in squares of monstrous brightness.  The geometrical flowers were made of folded narrow ribbon in the palest shades of pink, blue, dram and green.  It took grandmama a year to complete two flowers and their setting.  Looking back on the colors of that quilt, I can only think that she must have been born color blind, but we children reveled in its jarring tones.  Pale pink, violet, and pillar-box red struck us as delightful. Probably grandmama never regarded the colors as colors; to her each piece of stuff, dull or gay, represented an important event in her life.

 

EVERY PATCH A TALE

 

Sometimes she let us play a game.  One of us picked out a piece of stuff that took our fancy and she told us why it was there.  That small triangle of deep blue velvet decked with rosebuds was cut from Uncle Edward’s first walking frock, and the fact that he died at the age of four, beloved by all, gave the fragment a sentimental interest highly appreciated by his tiny nieces and nephews forty years later.

This handsome piece of violet brocade, worked with an exquisite pattern of hawthorn leaves was snipped from great-grandpapa’s fancy waistcoat, presented to him for heaven knows what by the B_____ Hunt.  It never occurred to any of us to ask grandmama why she spoilt an interesting garment simple to snip three inches off it for a spot of color on the quilt, nor do I suppose she could have told us if we had.

Three patches of cotton stuff, which might easily have been abstracted from a Union Jack, were a memorial to Albert and the twins, Caroline and Frederick.  They came to an untimely end at the seaside, where they untied a boat and put to sea, aged eight and five respectively.  Nothing has been heard of them since, and, as the currents there are notoriously dangerous and it is now 35 years ago, it is concluded that they were drowned.

 

FAMILY TRAGEDIES

 

Family tragedies, indeed, loom large in this quilt.  We all used to love a piece of golden brocade velvet in it, but only when I had grown up did I learn the reason why grandmama could never be persuaded to tell us the tale about it.  It was part of great-aunt Ann’s dance frock.  Aunt Ann was a beauty, and probably knew how well its yellow color suited her lovely complexion and velvet eyes.

Alas! Poor lady, she flirted with many good men but married a scoundrel, and died in dire poverty of ill-treatment, worry, and broken heart not two years later.  Grandpapa, incidentally, almost got imprisoned for life soon after for almost flogging to death the man who had treated his favorite sister so scurvily.

Uncle Tom’s Paisley snip of a tie is a brighter note, for he is still alive, a gay old bachelor of 78.  That tiny square of cream embroidery came from our mother’s christening robe.

Grandmama was always going to begin another quilt, to include dress remnants from our clothing and our father’s, but she never did.  Perhaps she remembered the fifteen years it had taken her to complete the other.

 

Nancy Page - Jack of All Trades

Last week I shared the Snowflake Quilt pattern from the Nancy Page Quilt Club circa 1932.  Nancy Page was the pen name of the prolific Florence La Ganke.  The Nancy Page columns were mostly about quilts and other handcrafts but many other domestic topics were explored.  Here's one from 1934 about Lois, The Perfect Hostess.

It's hard to tell whether is Betty is a welcome guest or otherwise.  My favourite part is the list of accessories necessary for Betty's comfort.

 

Lois Proves She Knows How to Be a Perfect Hostess

    When Betty arrived to stay at Lois’ home for a week both Lois and Roger were a bit dubious as to how things would work out. “You know, Lois, you aren’t any too strong and with the two children you will find your hands more than full.  Don’t you want to get a maid while Betty is here.  We can afford it and it will make work easier.”

    “I don’t think I’ll try a maid because I would have to break her in and that might be hard work and then too the children might not get along with her.  We would feel strange and rather unsure of ourselves, too.  No, I think I’ll try to get the cleaning woman for an extra day and I may send Ann over to Nancy’s for a day or so.  But we’ll mange.”

    Lois found things went easily.  She did not try to put on airs, nor do things more elaborately while the guest was there.

    She did take Betty’s breakfast up to her room every morning.  This allowed Lois to get Ann dressed and breakfasted, to give John David his early breakfast without upsetting his routine.  She straightened up the living room and arranged the porch.  Then when Betty came downstairs at nine o’clock the day was well started.

 

    Lois was a thoughtful hostess in more ways than one.  Before Betty arrived she had prepared the guest room and seen to it that certain accessories were in the room.  She had aspirin, soda bicarbonate, sunburn lotion, dusting powder, absorbent gauze and cotton, safety pins, needles and thread, thimble, ink, stationery, new pen points, flashlight, two or three recent books, stamps, telegraph blanks, lambs’ wool shoe shiner, garment bag, hangers, extra blanket.  But more important than any of these accessories was her intention which she carried out, of keeping the family living simple and unaffected while her guest was there.

Harrisburg Telegraph, Harrisburg Pennsylvania   July 11, 1934

 

Beginning the Snowflake Quilt - Nancy Page Quilt Club 1932

 

A direction leaflet that will aid in making the snowflake quilt will be sent free to any reader sending a stamped, addressed envelope to Nancy Page in care of The Idaho Statesman, Boise, Idaho.

“I’ve tried all week long to guess what kind of quilt you have for us today.  You said it would be cool, so I decided it must be green.  But you had a green and white one in the Tuesday Club – that Road to Dublin – so I didn’t see how you could plan another green one.  Come on, Nancy, tell us what it is. Don’t keep us in suspense any longer.”

“All right, all right.  Are you ready?  Here it is.  A snowflake quilt done in white on blue as soft and cool as the sky when the snowy clouds let us catch a peep of it.  This is really Mother Huldah’s quilt.  You know the people in the old country used to think that Mother Huldah was shaking her feather bed high in heaven when the fleecy, feathery snowflakes came drifting down.  That’s the kind of quilt this is.

“Now let me tell you how it is made.  For a long time I have had people say, ‘Oh, I don’t applique and I get bored with piecing quilts.  Can’t you give me a design to outline?’ And I always have said, ‘It is difficult to make an outline quilt look dignified and weighty enough to cover a bed.  Outline for a small crib cover, yes, because the whole quilt is made on a small scale.  But for a grown-up bed – no, it isn’t satisfactory when finished.

“But still there were some of you who believed I could work out something, and here it is.

“The snowflakes – and there are 12 giant, grown-up, truly adult ones on this quilt – are worked in white embroidery cotton on soft blue backgrounds.  But more than outline stitch is used.  I know, it does not look like it as you see the picture, but when you get the real design you will see places where I use feather stitch, Cretan stitch, chain, cable, Rumanian – oh, all sorts of interesting stitches.  I believe that enough solidity and good design will be possible so that the quilt will have real beauty.  It will be an airy, fairy beauty.  But that’s what we want to work on in the summertime.

“I have planned each snowflake for a 15-inch square of soft blue fast color gingham.  I’d like to see a rather dark blue, but so many modern bedrooms are done in pastel colors that I am afraid to work it out.  But imagine this is embroidered in white on a deep blue background with lighter snowdrifts in the border and then put it in an early American bedroom.  I think it would be enchanting.

“But I’m not scorning the softer blue at all.  In fact, I think that is what most of you will use.

“Since the blocks are only 15 inches square you can tuck one in your work bag and take it with you on your motor picnics.  Each week when the paper is delivered to your summer address you will get a new flake pattern to be embroidered.

“I have planned the quilt for a twin bed size.  It will be 75 inches wide and 99 inches long.  It may be made larger by repeating some of the snowflakes.  It may be made longer by using five rows instead of four.  Or the border may be made deeper.

“That border has white snowdrifts at the edge, then a winding, snowy road and then more snowdrifts deep blue in the shadows beyond the road.  And then comes the horizon and the rift of blue sky and last the snowy flakes.  It will be such easy pick-up word for summer and so pretty when finished that I know you will want to start at once.  Next week I will give you the various stitches use in embroidering the snowflakes.”

Idaho Daily Statesman; Boise Idaho; Sunday, July 10, 1932