Fancy Quilts
By the 1880s machine-manufactured bedding was widely available to average households. Women's magazines helped popularize the fancy quilt art form, encouraging women to create small decorative quilts for the parlor using fancy silk scraps and ribbons. Often commemorative and advertising ribbons were incorporated.
Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, c. 1909
Maker: Caroline A. MacKenzie MacKinnon
Built on the future site of the University of Washington, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition celebrated the West. The university today still uses the last two standing exposition buildings. Caroline MacKinnon collected daily ribbons and possibly entry tickets and sewed them into this banner.
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Cigar Band Top, c. 1910
Maker: Anna Brazeau
When she married Dr. Stephen Brazeau in 1906 in Asotin, Washington, Anna Williams was 37 and raising a 12-year old daughter from a previous marriage. Encouraged by popular advertising, she fashioned a colorful home decoration made from her husband’s silk cigar bands, carefully embroidering along the vertical rows. But she never finished.
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Cigarette Silks, c. 1900 -1920
Maker: Unknown
Around 1900 tobacco companies created cigarettes and packaged them with silk premiums to lure women to become smokers. Advertisers suggested using these “silkies” to make “useful items for decorating the home.” Ladies at a brothel in Walla Walla made this quilt around 1910.
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Crazy Kimono, c. 1927
Maker: Minta Taylor Ireland
Minta made this kimono as a surprise 1927 graduation present for her niece Dorothy Wann of LaCrosse, Washington. Dorothy had admired one that Minta made for her own daughter, saying it was the most elegant thing she had ever seen. The gown is made of scraps that Minta saved from her dressmaking shop in Corvallis, Oregon.
Crazy, c. 1890
Maker : Eudora Parker Meade
Trained in the skills and traditions of Southern womanhood, 25-year-old Eudora crafted exquisite needlework. Covered with embroidery, the silk and velvet quilt also has many unique designs. Eudora came to Spokane in 1887 to join her husband who was mining near the Canadian border. They lived in the wild for a time, but eventually returned to Spokane where Eudora worked at a millinery and dressmaking shop. The sewing scraps made their way into her quilt. She died in Spokane in 1922.
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Crazy with Red Border, c. 1890
Maker: Katie Gifford
Katie Gifford was an artist who used traditional crazy patchwork to create this stunning quilt.
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Crazy, c. 1920
Maker: Ida Walker
Ida Walker won a 1st place blue ribbon at the 1920 Spokane Interstate Fair in the “Crazy in Silk” category. Widowed with a son to raise, Ida struggled to keep food on the table, even selling extra milk from her cow to provide necessities. However, it did not hamper Ida’s ability to create with her needle.
Crazy with Triangle Border, c. 1890
Maker: Katie Gifford
Another Katie Gifford graphic artwork! Magazine and popular culture encouraged women of the 1890s to fulfill themselves creatively by expressing with their hands artistic and craft projects to decorate their homes. Katie’s wheel shapes create an inner motion that seems to reverse on itself in the sharply pointed triangles along the edge.
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Landscape, c. 1900
Maker: Unknown
Heavy with blanket filling, this utilitarian quilt was abandoned in a cellar trunk. To our modern eyes its design might evoke an aerial landscape of the region’s patchwork of farmland. But perhaps this quiltscape'’s charm is simply happenstance, the result of a quilter’s need for bedding to keep the hired man from freezing in the bunkhouse.
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Log Cabin - Court House Steps, c. 1900
Maker: Unknown
The maker of this artistic Log Cabin variation certainly had an intuitive ability with design and color. The maker chose men’s and women’s woolen suit fabrics and necktie silks. The light colors sparkle with luminosity against the black nighttime atmosphere.
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Log Cabin - Straight Furrows, c. 1890
Maker: Jeannie Creighton
Jeannie Creighton had plenty of time and a ready supply of silks and ribbons to hand-piece this graphic Log Cabin design. In 1890 the Creightons opened a very successful dry goods store in Moscow, Idaho, the same year that the University of Idaho began offering classes. Creighton's store remained in business until 2005!
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Log Cabin - Straight Set, c. 1920
Maker: Mrs. Hoyt
Magazine advertisements and catalogs provided the home maker with “bundles” of silks and velvets for her artistic endeavors. Made for the front room, these silk quilts were advertised “to keep women’s hands busy and calm her nervousness.” Mrs. Hoyt combined many colorful silks on a black background to produce graphic effect.
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Log Cabin – Broken Dishes, c. 1890
Maker: Katie Gifford
Katie displayed her artistic flare with this Log Cabin quilt made in New York as a gift for her sister's marriage. Using narrow strips of silk set in a complicated Broken Dishes pattern, she carefully fashioned light and dark fabrics to create a striped appearance. The treasured quilt migrated to Kansas City and to Spokane with the family until Katie's grand niece donated the quilt to the Museum. Katie herself came west and died in the Spokane area after 1910.
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Log Cabin, Inscribed: May 15th 1881
Maker: Catherine Bush Gwin
After raising 10 children on a 200-acre farm in Washington County, Iowa, Catherine pieced this cotton Log Cabin quilt. The family moved to central Iowa in 1885, and Catherine continued to make a variety of quilts before she died in Keota in 1914. Catherine's daughter brought these quilts to the Northwest and eventually two were donated to the Museum.
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Pineapple, c. 1910 and 1939
Maker: Matilda Anderson and Johanna Anderson
A single woman, working at Spokane's Crescent Store fur department about 1910, Matilda Anderson carefully saved colorful remnants from the coat linings that she replaced. After piecing the swirling pineapple shapes, she asked her sister-in-law Johanna to finish the quilt. Tying the front to back in a hidden method, Johanna completed the piece. Matilda then gave it to her.