Appraisal Day

Hi to all in blogland,

We got to spend another afternoon visiting with Gerald Roy and getting a couple of appraisals done.

We hardly ever buy quilts.  I look for antique textiles that can be used for making miniatures and although I love to look at antique quilts, we rarely buy them.  They take a lot of room to store and deserve the best of care.  However, sometimes something comes along and you just can't walk away.  The above quilt is a full size star.  Although it is impossible to say for sure, it screams Pennsylvania. There are a couple of things about it that are especially appealing to me.  The background is a shirting printed with blue figures - actually the quilt contains 2 different blue shirtings, a pink shirting and a third blue shirting for backing.  (Who doesn't love a good backing?)  The stars in the corner squares and setting triangles give it an extra oomph and the piecing and quilting are very nice.  Jerry told us that this quilt has never seen the light of day, as if it had there would be a lot of fading to the green and blue fabrics.  It has never been washed and interestingly the quilter marked it for quilting with a blue pencil.  Well, it is my favorite color palette and when we found it, I was physically incapable of leaving it.  We found it in an antique mall in St. Louis, MO.  It is circa 1880.



 

This is an Amish Framed Bars quilt from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  We bought it at auction in Ohio.  It was not advertised as such, so that worked to our advantage.  It doesn't show up all that well in the photo, but we consider it to be a real prize.  The top is wools and the backing is a cotton print.  The quilting is excellent and unusual.  It features baskets in the border quilting (shown below).  It is circa 1910.  It came out of a New York apartment and the owner had it stretched and attached it to a wooden frame with velcro.  It had been on a wall in the apartment and there is fading on the wide green binding. My guess is that they put it up there when people began to think of quilts as art in the 1970's.  While it is nice for the world to recognize quilts in that way, it was a sad day when they started stretching them flat and hanging them on walls.  Sigh.

 

 

I have pieced a miniature based on one of these quilts.  Can you guess which one?

 

Other things:  Karen left a comment asking what AQS considers a miniature quilt.  I looked it up, and basically it has to measure not more than 24"in length and 24" in width.  The quilt must be reduced in scale in all aspects.  That is the tricky part.  I made a personal decision a long time ago not to enter juried shows.  People jump all over me when they hear that, but I don't want the pressure or the hassle of doing it.  I am glad other people enter their quilts, but it is not my thing.  So, I had to look up what AQS thinks on the size.  My personal way of dealing with size and scale is this: if a viewer cannot tell what size my quilt is by looking at a photo of it, I consider it to be a success.

Till next time...........

Sheila