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243) with their saw-toothed circles cutting through straight bands
were the most beautiful in the world . Like New York Beauty, “Pickle
Dish” with its compass roses like the “Double Wedding Ring” (Chap-
ter "Circles", Page 81) has similar saw-toothed designs and became
another favorite.
Intricate is nice, but the simple solid-color motifs of the old order
Pennsylvania and Ohio Amish were stunning beauties of their own.
Amish quilts are either “old order” or else made after about the
1940s. Later, down to the present date, they have been made for the
general American market. Old ones are uniformly solid colors and
do not contain appliqué or “turkey tracks,” the embroidered stitches
that are sometimes used to decorate the seams of quilt pieces. Old
ones can use mixed fabrics; newer ones rarely do.
This collection includes several “Samplers” (Chapter "Sampler",
Page 357). They are a fun, and sometimes visually dramatic way to
collect a variety of patterns, one per block for the whole quilt.
I once read about a “Baltimore Album” quilt featuring multiple
squares, each decorated with a different elaborate appliquéd bouquet
of flowers, selling for a hundred thousand dollars at auction. In 2020
I see one with an opening price of over $2,000, and another with a
lower starting price hitting bids of over $900 with still a week to go
on the eBay auction, where prices tend to get driven up at the very
end of the auction period. The nearest example in this collection
is dated 1914. It is comprised of blocks filled with green and red
bouquets, but the colors are muted. It was only when I photographed
the quilt that I saw that the blocks had been embroidered in white
embroidery floss with the name and age of the makers. They were
old even then.
By the 1980s I was reading about African-American quilts, often
stitched together from corduroy scraps from a nearby textile factory,
or from pieces salvaged from pockets of old denim jeans and the like.
Others were noted for unconventional design and sometimes coarse
construction. They were as different from Baltimore Album quilts
Figure 3: African American Akimbo,
as could be, although I know that African-American women could Fig. 337, Page 382.
stitch the fine Baltimore Album quilts if they wanted to, and probably
did stitch many historical examples. But for the maker’s own use,
African-American quilts are often done in free-form and bold colors.
Some have been documented back to the 1930s, but being made
for home use and not attracting a popular market, more examples
probably existed and simply got used up. An African-American
artist acquaintance of mine from Seattle, Royal Alley-Barnes, calls the
designs “akimbo” quilts when they take a conventional and regular
design and break it all apart to reassemble in free form. She and
others continue to do that kind of work (Fig. 337, Page 382.)