Album quilts were made to honor an individual, to commemorate an important event, to celebrate a wedding, or to present as a gift to a special friend. A quilt can thus express friendship, love, or admiration. Album quilts consist of squares laid out in horizontal and vertical rows.
This quilt has a patriotic theme that celebrates Texas’s joining the union as a state in 1845. The square in the second row at the far right is decorated with a red star (the Lone Star) and the word “Texas”, surrounded by two sprays of oak leaves. The squares with eagles and cornucopias continue the patriotic theme. Other motifs found here are common in album quilts; a central square and a wicker basket of flowers, vases of flowers, and fruits in compotes.
This quilt is characterized by elaborate decoration, painstaking craftsmanship, and vivid designs. The twenty-five squares are laid out in rows and separated by sashes with diamond-shaped patterns that emphasize the design of each square. The asymmetrical arrangement of motifs adds to the liveliness of the quilt. The repeated colors and forms and the pattern of the stitching add to the dynamism and complexity of the quilt’s design.
Each square in this quilt has an appliquéd design. Pieces of fabric are cut, then sewn down onto a solid-colored fabric. The quilt top, the area with the elaborate pattern, is stitched to an inner layer of cotton or wool, and a backing of plain fabric. The entire quilt was tea-stained, resulting in the light tan color of the background cloth. This technique softened and blended the quilt’s colors.
The creation of a quilt was a group effort. Each woman contributed a block to the quilt and often signed it with her name. However, today it is difficult to attribute the quilts to specific individuals. Most album quilts were made in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore was a center of the Methodist Church in America and during the 1840s and 1850s many new churches were founded. Sewing circles at Methodist churches made not only clothes and bed coverings for the poor, but also many of the album quilts.
The term “album” indicates that these quilts are related to the nineteenth-century remembrance or autograph album. “The practice of giving individual blocks for quilts with the idea of having the whole recall friends to the owner, had its counterpart in the autograph album”. 1 These volumes contained collections of sentimental verse and drawings, religious homilies, artfully framed signatures, and elaborate endearments.
-
Dena S. Katzenberg, Baltimore Album Quilts (Baltimore:The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1981), p. 13.
