Twelve Quilts of Christmas 2016 – #10

 

This quilt “knocks my socks off”.  Where do I start?

• Those liberated borders?
• Those feathers that curl over the flowers in the border?
• The stuffed trapunto work in the quilting?
• Those leaves in the border and how they are sprinkled along the vine?
• Those wee flowers that curl out of the centre flowers?
• The colour combination?
• Those petals in the outward facing flowers in the border?
• Those petals in the outer flowers in the individual block compositions?
• Those Rose of Sharon centre flowers?

 

I love how the general concept of the Quilt on Day 8 has been elevated with a more complex overall composition and more detailed floral elements.   Bravo Cirendilla!

 

With this quilt we are once again the very fortunate recipients of the enthusiasm and energy of quilt historians.  This quilt was discovered during the Kentucky Quilt Project.  The brain child of Bruce Mann, a Louisville quilt dealer, he envisioned a documentation project, an exhibition and a book to preserve the legacy of Kentucky quilts.  Tragically he died in 1980 before the project was launched, but the efforts of Eleanor Bingham Miller, Eunice Sears, Shelly Zegart, Katy Christopherson and Dorothy West, saw that the project he envisioned was realized.  The book Kentucky Quilts: 1800 – 1900 by Jonathan Holstein and John Finley records this project for posterity.  The fascinating records of the project are held by the University of Louisville.  Kentucky Quilts was one of the first quilt documentation/quilt history books that I collected.  And it is one that I go back to again and again.

 

 The book says it all in the caption notes for this quilt, describing it as “an almost perfect example of an American appliqué quilt …”  

 

Thank you Bruce, Eleanor, Shelly, Eunice, Katy, Dorothy, Jonathan and John (and all the others involved in the Kentucky Quilt Project).