Crazy Quilts have been an iconic part of quilt history since the 1800s. Similarly, Discover Vintage America has been a sustained force in antiques and history since the early 1970s! Congratulations on 50 Years! My rewarding association with Discover Vintage began in 2015 when they were “looking to start a monthly column on quilting.” I started writing “Covering Quilts” in 2015, so I am already celebrating eight years. While I had previously written only about quilt history, the editors wanted a wider mix of topics, so my writing and research expanded. This endeavor has been a continual learning and growing experience for me, and I hope for my readers as well. Speaking of challenges, my fellow Island Batik fabric ambassadors and I were recently challenged to create a “Crazy Quilt,” which spurred more research on my part. Coincidentally, at the same time, a fellow quilt historian was teaching a study session on what quilts qualify as “Crazy Quilts.” So clearly, this all leads to the question . . .

What is a Crazy Quilt?

Is a Crazy Quilt just the classic velvet, silk, and satin embroidered and embellished quilts from the 1880s as discussed and illustrated in my last column or is there more? The answer is, the category contains much more, and really, the sky is the limit on what can be a crazy quilt. Obviously, the traditional Victorian Era version created with fancy fabric and intricate stitching is the starting point, but most seen is the “contained crazy” block style.

Contained crazies generally have the same random style of piecing as the fancy 1880s versions but are made up of blocks -squares or rectangles. The Victorian versions are often composed of blocks too but contained crazies tend to be framed or contained by sashing. 

utahquiltappraiser.blogspot.com

Last month, I wrote about the origins of the classic antique quilt pattern, Rocky Road To Kansas. While it sounds like a design dating back to the pioneer days of the 1850s, it actually hails from the late 1800s – definitely, after the railroad system had made travel less rocky to Kansas and beyond. It was most popular in the 1880s and ‘90s and on through the 1940s. While not a rare antique pattern, it is not very common.

I’ve long loved the large scale and scrappy purple Rocky Road to Kansas made by my great-grandmother, Isabelle Rogers, in the 1930s in rural Utah. She home-dyed cotton fabric salvaged, recycled, or upcycled from flour and sugar sacks for the purple background and the yellow backing fabric. You can’t go wrong with purple and bright yellow! She used muslin foundations as a base for her crazy piecing. Some of her triangle points have just two pieces and others have more than a dozen. This variety of piecing and different scale/size of pieces adds a lot of interest and character to the classic pattern. It is a great way to use scraps or leftover fabrics, but it is perfect for fun new fabrics, too.

Fast forward to March, when I needed to make a project for a quilt challenge. I jumped at the chance to recreate her quilt using a new collection of Island Batiks featuring blues and greens and the much-beloved purple in her honor. I love working in small scale, so I chose to remake her design using little three-inch block sections that join to make six-inch blocks. Quite a difference from her blocks that measure 15 inches. She pieced her blocks in strips and strings and random piecing, I followed printed paper foundations for my blocks. To make my version less formal and more folksy like the inspiration quilt, each block has four different units, placed in different positions. It was a joy to remake the quilt and honor my great-grandmother whom I never had the privilege of meeting. I feel like I always make a bond or connection with the original quilter when I recreate an antique or vintage work, and this one was extra special.

The modern quilting movement has focused on blocks with simple, clean lines and improvisational piecing, so the Rocky Road to Kansas fits right in.

utahquiltappraiser.blogspot.com

Quilt names : ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’,

It’s a quilt name that stirs up images of wagons full of bonneted prairie ladies busily sewing while bumping across the endless Western frontier. “The hardships endured by the sturdy pioneers were constantly in the minds of the early American quilters and inspired many (quilt) names. ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’, (all) have a great interest as they reveal to us the thoughts of our great-grandmothers over their quilting frames.” — Marie Webster, 1916. We now know this nostalgic image of wagons of quilters is simply charming fiction. The Kansas Quilt Documentation Project found no proof that “any pioneers taking the road to Kansas when it was truly rocky made (this) string quilt since the pattern appeared after railroads facilitated trips to Kansas.

The initial publication of a string-pieced Rocky Road to Kansas quilt pattern was not until the Ladies Art Company catalog in 1895. This was the first mail-order catalog of quilt blocks and included almost 300 patterns. Obviously, descriptive names like “X Block” and “String Star” are not dreamy and do not sell quilt patterns in the same way, so this romantic myth of “Quilts of The West” continues to roll on.

The main sections of the pattern involve easy sewing of strips, strings, or random pieces. But the background pieces were traditionally inset with Y seams, which can be tricky. Most quilters now split the background diamonds in half for simple piecing. For a more formal look, strip piecing can be used. One sews cut strips together and then slices the strip segments into four triangles or Vs for each block. Another name for this pattern is The Kite Block, first published in The Ohio Farmer (1897). It features four strip-pieced kites flying nose to nose (looking at the pattern from a different direction). I found a charming small-scale version of this pattern, circa 1890 from Lancaster County, PA, with red and Lancaster Blue centers, a yellow framing row, and a Double Pink background. This careful color placement and straight line or strip piecing in some areas help control what could be a very wild quilt.

utahquiltappraiser.blogspot.com