Textiles and the Triplett Sisters

How do you honor a 20-year career studying, preserving, and collecting quilts? By allowing the graduate student who became a curator the opportunity to showcase her work in an exhibition we can see the impact she has had. Carolyn Ducey was a grad student at Indiana University, when she applied to study quilts with Dr. Patricia Crews at the University of Nebraska. Shortly afterward she was hired as the first curator of the Center, later to become International Quilt Study Center & Museum (IQSCM.) Carolyn and Sara Dillow (the first Acquisitions Coordinator) worked together to gather some of the earliest quilts in the collection, pre-1850. Sara was also responsible for the first international additions from Kathryn Berenson, 30 white wholecloth quilts, which opened their eyes to the possibility of international textiles. At the unexpected deaths of...

Although I could easily write several more blogs on the 2018 Houston Quilt Festival, this will be our last. We have too many other adventures to share with you, and I’m getting behind on the multiple antique quilt exhibitions I’ve seen lately. However, I couldn’t leave the 2018 Festival without sharing with you this special exhibition, Antique Quilts of the British Isles. It was very hard to choose which quilts to feature from this exhibit, because there were so many amazing ones. However, it is hard to ignore a quilt which has 45,000 ¼ inch hexagons. It was completed in the 1840s and exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. This quilt was on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum for many years. One distinctive tradition in British quilts is the center medallion...

The Triplett Sisters’ love medallion quilts, particularly those that use chintz “panels” for the center. So, imagine our excitement when the American Quilt Study Group decided to make medallions the subject of the next quilt study. Yippee! That means that fifty members of the organization will be making medallion quilts. That means a traveling exhibit of medallion quilts will hit the road to spark the creativity of quilters across the nation with these medallion quilts inspired by historical quilts. Immediately after the announcement last fall, ideas began to emerge. Museums and private collections were searched for the best medallion quilt. Which one quilt would inspire a quilter so much that the quilter either wanted to reproduce the antique quilt or create a new quilt based on the antique quilt. Medallion panels were made using fabric created...

 May the road rise up to meet you,filled with inspiration from your dreams.May the light shine upon your projectwith your fabric stash un-ending.May your quilts be easy binding,as you create your legacy.May your needles be easy threading,with all your notions at hand reach,as God holds you in the palm of his hand. 

I love borders or frames on quilts! I’m always looking for some new ideas for my borders. An exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art provided me with a LOT of new ideas for borders. Perhaps I should I say old ideas...really, really old ideas. Some third to fifth century ideas from Syria to be exact. For those of you wondering what is the oldest use of the diamond is in a square design, I would ask you to consider this mosaic. It might not be the earliest known to humanity, but from the third century it certainly is an early example, with...wait for it...multiple borders. This artist didn’t subscribe to the rule of three. Borders don’t need to be geometric shapes, they can also be people or animals. Granted some of these borders seem a...