Textiles and the Triplett Sisters

After more than 2 years because of Covid cancellations, the annual Zieber Quilt History Retreat was finally able to meet again. This year the theme was Viva La France, with guest speaker Sandy Sutton and her textiles. Besides being an avid textile and quilt collector, her son lives in the Alsace region of France, which means she has lots of opportunities to acquire the textiles there. We started the retreat with an examination of "Toile de Jouy" or cloth from Jouy-en-Josas a town/suburb SW of Paris. (Note, when purchasing the train ticket to visit, be sure you use the full name of the town. When Kay and I visited the site, I almost got arrested/thrown off the train because she’d accidently purchased my ticket incorrectly for Jouy. Thankfully the train conductor took pity on me when...

I can’t believe it is almost a New Year! I haven’t even finished telling/showing you more of the Houston Quilt Festival. Don’t worry, we’ll get back to that in the next blog. However, I couldn’t wait to tell you about what is coming up for the Triplett Sisters in the New Year 2022. First, there is the new EPP quilt along with Diamante and More Sampler. The directions provide a suggested workflow to help you accomplish the quilt top in 1 year. It is available as a kit or a pattern, so you can choose your own fabrics. (Here’s the link.) I’ll be making another one right along with you, while giving history tidbits and pointers. Since I’ve already made the one with the cream background, I’m choosing a dark background (green or black) this time...

As you may recall, this year my sister and I had the Huguenot Friendship Quilt exhibit at the Houston Quilt Festival. We realized that not everyone was able to attend the festival this year, so we thought we’d take you to the festival through our blog. Since the big prize-winning quilts have been readily available online, I thought I would focus on other parts of the festival starting with miniature quilts. I’ve only written one other blog on miniature quilts, perhaps because not many miniature quilts are antique. It seems to be a more recent phenomenon. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History only has one quilt in the collection labeled “Miniature” and it was likely a Doll Quilt. True miniature quilts are patterns/designs found in large quilts but recreated in a smaller scale. Ideally, in...

Triplett Sisters Block of the Month! Our first Block of the Month: “1856 Huguenot Friendship Quilt” just completed an exhibition at the Houston Quilt Festival. We had the original antique quilt, plus seven different versions of the quilt hanging for all to see. It was wonderful to view the variety of methods and approaches next to each other. We’ve worked on creating a video of the exhibition and when it is available, we will post on our YouTube page. Until then, I’ve included photos of the quilts in this blog.   We also plan to have an exhibition of our second Block of the Month: "The Wedding Album Quilt." (Don’t worry, if you haven’t started yet, everyone works at their own pace.) In fact, I hadn’t started yet either, because as a single person I was...

As you may have noticed, my sister Kay and I recently returned from a trip to Greece and some of the islands. We did all of the regular tourist things: seeing the Acropolis/Parthenon, the archeological museum, the Acropolis/Parthenon Museum. We also had to visit folk art museums and history museums to find textiles. As always when visiting a new country, we have much to learn about the textiles of the area. We didn’t expect to find quilts in such a toasty climate, but we were thrilled to see all the different types of handwork…lots of amazing, detailed handwork! Each island and/or tribe had their own traditional costume filled with decoration. I have no idea how many hours of handwork went into making the clothing, sheets or bedding, but it was a joy to see. Greece is...