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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1W9ubjR:
So I was talking to @albymangroves and discovered we were both super into textile arts, and I remembered that I have this crazy quilt carefully folded away into a trunk. So my uncle gave my sisters some quilts our great-grandmother made, but there were only three, so he gave me this one. I guess I got the special treatment because I was his godchild, I’m not sure. Anyway, he never explained where he got it or how. It’s dated “1888″ in laid-and-couched glitter piping– some is missing, but that’s the only numerals they could be, I think– and it’s signed “Jennie Freeman”, who is not to my knowledge connected to our family at all.
It’s entirely pieced; the batting is made of wool scraps similarly crazy-quilted together. There are some painted panels (including a woodland scene with a tipi and a leaping deer), and some applique panels, and some figurative embroidery portraits, including possibly a self-portrait of the artist in a bonnet? The artistic quality is uneven but it’s possible it was all Jennie’s work; it makes sense to me that she’d be great at painting/embroidering flowers after what was clearly a lifetime in the decorative domestic arts, and considerably less-practiced at figurative portraits like the birds, the cat, the scissors and spool, and the woman’s face.
Every scrap is edged in a decorative stitch, mostly feather stitch variants as far as I can tell. I don’t see any machine sewing anywhere.
Much of the fabric is decayed in places, and some of the stitching is coming loose. I don’t know how to preserve or display this. I don’t know if I should repair it, or if I should conserve it– I’ve worked in museums enough to know that conservation means making no alterations to it that cannot be undone, and focusing on preserving as much of it original as possible. Repairing it would mean replacing the damaged panels with modern material so that I could use or display it without it degrading further, but it would destroy some if its historical value to do it that way.
So I don’t know, so I keep it carefully folded inside-out inside a wooden trunk in my attic, with a cedar block to keep insects away. There’s some sun in some of these photos, but i assure you, me holding it near a sunbeam is the most light it’s seen since I owned it.
It’s about a standard twin size, and I’ve no idea what to do with it. I can’t imagine how many hundreds of hours of labor it represents. I don’t know how to go about finding out who Jennie Freeman was. My uncle, unfortunately, passed away not long after giving this to me, so I have absolutely no idea whether any of his friends would even know; probably not.
I guess you can see that the crazy tiny scraps are all made into largeish squares that are then sewn together pretty regularly. The batting is also made of scraps; the decayed pieces allow this to be seen. It’s not quite square, the edges are a little uneven, and the batting is lumpy because the scraps were not all the same thickness. It’s not through-quilted; the top stitching is all only in the top layer. It’s tacked down in regular intervals with a single stitch through all the layers.
The back is in panels of white cotton and silvery satin-ish fabric. The entire edge is overcast in a hand blanket stitch in bright red thread.
Pardon the backdrop of my messy attic, it’s just the only space I had handy to lay it out. My cat might be in the background. I did not let her step on this, though she badly wanted to.
So I want to make a thing like this, but what an extravagance of personal time!
So I was talking to @albymangroves and discovered we were both super into textile arts, and I remembered that I have this crazy quilt carefully folded away into a trunk. So my uncle gave my sisters some quilts our great-grandmother made, but there were only three, so he gave me this one. I guess I got the special treatment because I was his godchild, I’m not sure. Anyway, he never explained where he got it or how. It’s dated “1888″ in laid-and-couched glitter piping– some is missing, but that’s the only numerals they could be, I think– and it’s signed “Jennie Freeman”, who is not to my knowledge connected to our family at all.
It’s entirely pieced; the batting is made of wool scraps similarly crazy-quilted together. There are some painted panels (including a woodland scene with a tipi and a leaping deer), and some applique panels, and some figurative embroidery portraits, including possibly a self-portrait of the artist in a bonnet? The artistic quality is uneven but it’s possible it was all Jennie’s work; it makes sense to me that she’d be great at painting/embroidering flowers after what was clearly a lifetime in the decorative domestic arts, and considerably less-practiced at figurative portraits like the birds, the cat, the scissors and spool, and the woman’s face.
Every scrap is edged in a decorative stitch, mostly feather stitch variants as far as I can tell. I don’t see any machine sewing anywhere.
Much of the fabric is decayed in places, and some of the stitching is coming loose. I don’t know how to preserve or display this. I don’t know if I should repair it, or if I should conserve it– I’ve worked in museums enough to know that conservation means making no alterations to it that cannot be undone, and focusing on preserving as much of it original as possible. Repairing it would mean replacing the damaged panels with modern material so that I could use or display it without it degrading further, but it would destroy some if its historical value to do it that way.
So I don’t know, so I keep it carefully folded inside-out inside a wooden trunk in my attic, with a cedar block to keep insects away. There’s some sun in some of these photos, but i assure you, me holding it near a sunbeam is the most light it’s seen since I owned it.
It’s about a standard twin size, and I’ve no idea what to do with it. I can’t imagine how many hundreds of hours of labor it represents. I don’t know how to go about finding out who Jennie Freeman was. My uncle, unfortunately, passed away not long after giving this to me, so I have absolutely no idea whether any of his friends would even know; probably not.
I guess you can see that the crazy tiny scraps are all made into largeish squares that are then sewn together pretty regularly. The batting is also made of scraps; the decayed pieces allow this to be seen. It’s not quite square, the edges are a little uneven, and the batting is lumpy because the scraps were not all the same thickness. It’s not through-quilted; the top stitching is all only in the top layer. It’s tacked down in regular intervals with a single stitch through all the layers.
The back is in panels of white cotton and silvery satin-ish fabric. The entire edge is overcast in a hand blanket stitch in bright red thread.
Pardon the backdrop of my messy attic, it’s just the only space I had handy to lay it out. My cat might be in the background. I did not let her step on this, though she badly wanted to.
So I want to make a thing like this, but what an extravagance of personal time!
