1970s Crazy Quilt

1970s Crazy Quilt

I think this 1970s Crazy Quilt was made by my former Mother In Law, Ruby Thompson of California and Oklahoma.  It is a utility quilt, with wide bright velvet top panels and some funky red and blue herrigbone houndstooth wool and some chartreuse fabric along the side panels.  It is a tack quilt-- a common quilting style for casual home quilts that were designed for warmth and to hold down the covers.  It is heavy and the backing is hemp or linen in cream with about an inch-wide binding edge.

Look close, and you can see that it was constructed by sewing five panels of varying widths together vertically.  Each panel was first made up of some foundation blocks.  This one is constructed with so much asymmetry that it is almost possible to understand the order in which each piece was added.  We know from the seams further toward the top that the Red V panel and the Black Brick panel were sewn together before adding the Burgundy/Gold panel, and the edges at top and sides were added thereafter.  (Actually, this is photographed with the bottom of the quilt at the top of the pic--- it was made probably for a small bed and the borders were intended to hang on the sides and foot of the bed.  I'm guessing it was intended to lay under the pillows, flat.)

Cathedral Windows Quilt from Cherokee County, Oklahoma

Cathedral Windows Quilt

Made in Cherokee County, Oklahoma

A closeup inspection of this colorful quilt makes it worthy of a lifetime achievement award.  Oh, it is ragged in spots and torn in places.  It is machine-mended but mostly hand-made.  Each color spot that you see is about 3 layers thick and has a great deal of time applied.  For Cathedral Windows, you start with a large square and then tack it back on four sides.  This one was done with the centerpiece of each square added last and sort of nudged into place with greater or less skill.  We can make some assumptions about when it was constructed by looking at all of those centerpieces.  Some are double-knit polyester of the kind popular in the early 1970s, and that seems to be the most recent distinctive clue--- I would say it was made from 1970s fabric... but it may have been put together more recently than that.

When I bought it, it was at a flea market or yard sale, and the seller told me it was made by a family member or friend---  a woman who lived at Woodall all her life and passed away at age 90 in a house fire.  Woodall is a community Southwest of Tahlequah in Cherokee County, Oklahoma.

How much time and patience, tenacity and artistry and skill such a quilt takes!  When I see a quilt like this at a sale, sometimes I can't resist to add it to my own little tacky quilt museum in the hall closet, as a tribute to the labor of women in a simpler time. 

1909 Charm Afghan

1909 Charm Afghan

Despite rumors that I was a little girl in 1909, this is not one of my creations.  This afghan was purchased.  Always ask when you buy an old textile item, because often you can keep the info about its history which adds an interesting factor.  This afghan was made by Berta Conklin Alteres, who was born in Fort Smith Arkansas.  She lived in Wagoner County Oklahoma, and this afghan was purchased in Wagoner or Cherokee County, Oklahoma in the 1990s.  I love the wool crocheted ruffle, although there are some raggedy places in it.

"Charm" textiles are made with scraps and surplus.  They tend to be less "patterny", more random and funkier than perfectly planned textiles.  I like to see the random or raucous color combinations.  It is a delight to see how women Skwooched things together to make them fit and become orderly despite limitations such as mixed quantities of different wool.  This one is all wool.  Crocheters will attest-- using wool takes more finger power than acrylic yards today.  Wools are dyed differently and take color less evenly than acrylic. 

The person who sold me this afghan thought it was made in about 1909.  But as usual, I have a red flag question.  One square is varigated, and I'm wondering if varigated commercial yarn was invented back then?  But maybe, it wasn't commercial yarn and Ms. Alteres or someone else dyed it ombre/varigated herself.

Pin Wheel Quilt

Pinwheel Quilt

Somehow along the way I have sort of lost track of my quilt provenances.  I don't recall how I came to own this lovely bright happy quilt top.  It is small and it is oh-so-badly stitched (by hand).  But it is darling, and one day if I ever find the time to take it and quilt it up....

Bootleggers and Quakers, and a Family Quilt

Bigmom's Quilt

My grandmother was Mary Katherine Enlow Kirk Davis.  She grew up around Notchie and Blackgum and Qualls, then lived at Boudinot, Stone Chapel and Tahlequah.  She was a seamstress and tailor, and she owned a dry cleaners.  She had five children and four of them were girls.  So back in the 1940s and 1950s she designed and executed a lot of prom dresses and fancy girls' outfits, not just for her own daughters but also for all of their friends.  She was pretty amazing as a seamstress.  Cherokee County was kinda different when she was a teenager.  Her brother Roy had the first car and was quite the popular guy.  Roy, um, was a bootlegger.  He was older and Mary would get her parents' permission to spend the night at his house in town, along with her girlfriend.  Roy kept a stock of bootleg liquor under the flooring in his house, and the girls would help him lift out the bottles so he could load up his car to make a delivery.  She told me, "Daddy would have been ashamed if he knew we'd been helping with bootlegging.  They didn't know Roy was involved in that.  But he'd give us money to buy a new dress every time we helped him and I'd come home with that new dress, looking proud."  Bigmom also told about life at Qualls when she lived there with her parents.  One time Pretty Boy Floyd came to their house and, as was the custom, anyone who came for a visit was invited to join in for a meal.  He left some money under his plate.

Cherokee County was the home of a few outlaws back in those days and later on.  Perhaps some time this blog will tell the story of Kye Carlile, who was just kinfolks to most folks around what is now the North end of Lake Tenkiller.  Back then, he was a wanted man. 

My grandmother passed away when my daughter Katy was about 4 years old, so it must have been 1989.  She was the most patient and happy, hard-working and skilled woman I have ever met.  She was funny and I always loved to stay with her because we'd make cookies without a recipe or eat big globs of honeycomb, drink Nehi Grape Soda, plant trees, pick strawberries or peaches, play with dogs, gather eggs, shop for Easter dresses-- and once she let me eat Exlax Chocolate because I threw a fit for it.  We had tea parties with the neighbor girls, too.  I don't think she ever said anything harsh to me.  She claimed to be kin to Ulysses Grant, but made me promise not to talk about it because he was bad to drink and had disgraced the family.  She said that one of men in her family in generations past (Abraham Enlow) was the birth father of Abraham Lincoln, and that Abraham Lincoln's mother had worked as a servant to the Enlows.  She was from Quaker ancestors and her parents were fervently religious.  She was a Nazarene for a while there. 

When my grandmother passed, my aunts wanted me to have this quilt by her.  I was the only family member quilting at that time, and this is just a quilt top.  I have been saving it to make up for a wedding gift for my daughter (oops too late) or a niece.  It is sateen blocks set into what you might call a lightning bolt pattern in pastels.  I'm guessing she was making it for Katy and just never finished it.  It looks like bright Mexican giant rickrack.  Sateen is not a sturdy or durable fabric, so I just take it out every few years and admire it and then put it back into a dark closet, waiting for some future time.

Walnut-Dyed Chief's Quilt

I made this fun quilt quite a few years back, and it won an award in the Cherokee National Holiday Quilt Show.  You can see that some of the fabrics are satin.  Satin is not a dyer's cloth because it doesn't absorb and hold color without being shocked.  Um, that means "runined."  So look at the shiny strips-- those are the commercial satin.  The flat strips are hand dyed with walnut hulls.  The cool thing about walnuts, you already know if you've ever picked up big dog food sized bags of them in the fall--- they stain.  On a nice Autumn day when Kanny and Kaleb were little, our Saturday fun was to station a drum and wheelbarrow in the yard, and practice throwing walnuts into the barrel from wherever we found them in the yard.  (It soon became apparent that walnuts may go IN to a wheelbarrow, but if so they'll probably knock out at least as many or more walnuts in doing so.)  So there we were at the end of the day, with brown stained hands that nothing could clean except time.

Later in the winter a pickle barrel full of walnuts was sitting under the eave and got filled with rainwater.  THAT is a stinky mess.  I took a bunch of recycled sheets and jammed them down in the water, covering with a lid, and let them soak till Spring.  I didn't use any mordant or fixer, and I didn't precondition them with alum or anything.  In fact, they had been washed with soap on multiple occasions and were plain white sheets.

I was delighted when I pulled them out and saw the subtle shading.  Some places were foxed from being at water level.  Some places were paler or darker.  Even some sheets took the color better than others.  It is amazing to get disparate results like on these strips when using basically the same technique, right down to putting them in the same dyepot.  We can guess that there may have been a difference in the cotton content, with some sheets having more synthetic fibers... although I thought they were all cotton.  Even bleaching in a former life may have influenced the color variance.  The circle and the color "clouds" are all things that showed up in the natural dyeing process.

A cool thing about walnut dyeing is that walnuts are plentiful--- you just use the hulls and all.  And it can be done long and slow without a rigorous process.  Or it can be done quickly over a boil with stirring for more of a vat-dyed outcome (even coloration).  I suspect that temperature influences color intensity, as do the amount of water mixed with the hulls and the age of the hulls.  Green hulls would give a silvery champagne tone and oozy black hulls would give darker tones.  Basket reed dyers will attest to the fact that different natural fibers, whether it be fabric or reed, wood or wool, will take the dye differently.  Some fibers such as silk will be hard to color without using some technique to grab and bite the color.  Silk is just hard to dye sometimes.

I think this quilt was commercially quilted by Wavalene at Living Designs in Tahlequah and it is probably lo-loft batted with a pantogram design perhaps that Wavalene has created.

I was experimenting with pintucking when I worked on this quilt.  I had seen a beautiful dress of Rachel Martin in a Cherokee art book.  I think it is in a museum in Tennessee.  Rachel Martin was a distant relative and of a notable Cherokee family in history, and her spectacular dress had a lot of pintucking and pleats.  Here's a detail view showing the informal pintucking on the header and footer borders of this quilt:

Doesn't the marbling from walnut dye and the funky pintucking make for an elegant and complex visual experience?  This quilt is sort of plain but it has interesting visual and tactile textures.

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

When my cousin had a garage sale, I bought a couple of quilts.  One was a glittery fifties heavy cabin quilt that had been made out of tufted fifties upholstery fabric with the metallic thread loops.  And the other one was a dark, rough hand quilted quilt that had been made from mens twill pants and dark wool pants.  I'm guestimating that it was quite old... maybe from the 1930s or so.  It looked like this:

When I washed it, the heavy old dark thing sort of came apart in a few places, and it became apparent that inside was an even older quilt that had been used as the batting.  Carefully, I removed a few of the shells of quilting that had held the layers together.  This revealed a remarkable mystery--- an even older quilt that was SOOO old that the colors had almost faded away.  Inside, it was all hand quilted still yet, and I could make out a quilted pattern.  Squares were about nine inches, and some squares had charm strip piecing pointed inward, so four squares together looked like arrows pointing in with  > < the tails pointing out.  The fabrics were diverse.  There was a red dotted swiss that looked like it had been flocked.  There were teensy tiny blue gingham wove checks and the same in pink or what may have once been red.  The back of the inner quilt was wholecloth of  the same blue gingham.  I noticed some silk pieces.  And a kind of fabric that is textured in squares with gauze or thin cotton between thicker cotton weave.  One of the solid squares is today yellow, and it may have been either yellow or green originally.

If you are interestedin helping to establish the history of this quilt, please contact me.  I think it is very very old, like more than a hundred years old.  The only provenance is that was a heavy winter quilt in my uncle's cabin back in the 1960sand was later owned by my cousin Cathy Burns Carter, so we don't know if has been in the family for longer than that.