A visit to the quilt museum
I had an assignment at the New England Quilt Museum on Tuesday, my first day back from vacation. I brought Nana Lord's quilt along for the ride with the hope of getting an opinion on how to clean the darn thing.
So I walked through the Paul Pilgrim exhibit and got terribly intimidated. Nice quilts. He was an antiques dealer who collected quilts; he became enamoured of "orphan blocks," the quilt blocks he'd just find lying around, uncompleted and unloved. He'd buy them, but they really didn't have a market, and then he decided to take up quilting himself and he used the blocks to make all kinds of cool quilts. There were quilts with different size blocks, quilts with applique, quilts with really bad blocks, and they were all just awesome.
Anita, the museum's curator, told me Pilgrim had been from a drycleaning family and was meticulous when it came to cleaning and pressing his blocks (ironing, of course, is a big part of quilting or any sewing for that matter). Unfortunately, Paul Pilgrim died of a rare family cancer, so the perfect person to ask about how to clean my grandmother's quilt is dead. I wonder if I'll have to resort to the Ouija board, like Mark Arsenault and I did back at The Gardner News when the mayor wouldn't comment on the status of the police department? (I wonder if Manca still holds a grudge for that? Against Mark, of course, because I'm the good reporter in the good reporter/bad reporter game)
But anyway, I took the quilt into the library and talked with the awesome library ladies, who unfolded the thing and then oohed and aahed. They said they'd never seen one quite like it, with the holidays and seasons, and were intrigued when I told them it was one in a series she'd made. They gave me the contact info for the MassQuilt documentation project, which is looking for much older quilts, but they thought because of the nature of Nana Lord's quilts, they might be interested.
Their verdict on the cleaning: don't even try. There are just too many fabrics in it, and too many silks, and too many fabrics in bad condition, and I might be making things worse. Spot cleaning may be possible, though.
One of the women (great reporter that I am, I didn't take notes or get names) wondered about the significance and source material of the white and gold thread patches, since they appear in several places. They're probably not from a tie; were they from a party dress? Something significant? Or was Nana Lord just being thrifty with a fabric she'd found?
As far as displaying it, hanging is definitely out. I wasn't keen on hanging it anyway -- where do you hang a worn, multicolored crazy quilt anyway? -- but I would like to have it out, somewhere. They suggested a quilt rack, and said I should make sure to refold it, in quarters, every so often so it wouldn't get creased. Which leads to another quilt mystery -- the thing does not crease. It has no batting inside, it's made from all these silks, you'd think it would be a mass of wrinkles, but no, it's always been iron-straight (except around the edges, where Nana Lord wasn't quite so careful sewing the new back on but, I repeat, the woman was in her 80s, cut her some slack).
My father thinks there was at least one quilt made per brother, and my mother believes Uncle John's was on a Spanish theme, since he and his wife went to Spain on their honeymoon. I have to dig up my scrapbook; the Ipswich Chronicle wrote about her quilts at one point and I have a copy of the article.
So I walked through the Paul Pilgrim exhibit and got terribly intimidated. Nice quilts. He was an antiques dealer who collected quilts; he became enamoured of "orphan blocks," the quilt blocks he'd just find lying around, uncompleted and unloved. He'd buy them, but they really didn't have a market, and then he decided to take up quilting himself and he used the blocks to make all kinds of cool quilts. There were quilts with different size blocks, quilts with applique, quilts with really bad blocks, and they were all just awesome.
Anita, the museum's curator, told me Pilgrim had been from a drycleaning family and was meticulous when it came to cleaning and pressing his blocks (ironing, of course, is a big part of quilting or any sewing for that matter). Unfortunately, Paul Pilgrim died of a rare family cancer, so the perfect person to ask about how to clean my grandmother's quilt is dead. I wonder if I'll have to resort to the Ouija board, like Mark Arsenault and I did back at The Gardner News when the mayor wouldn't comment on the status of the police department? (I wonder if Manca still holds a grudge for that? Against Mark, of course, because I'm the good reporter in the good reporter/bad reporter game)
But anyway, I took the quilt into the library and talked with the awesome library ladies, who unfolded the thing and then oohed and aahed. They said they'd never seen one quite like it, with the holidays and seasons, and were intrigued when I told them it was one in a series she'd made. They gave me the contact info for the MassQuilt documentation project, which is looking for much older quilts, but they thought because of the nature of Nana Lord's quilts, they might be interested.
Their verdict on the cleaning: don't even try. There are just too many fabrics in it, and too many silks, and too many fabrics in bad condition, and I might be making things worse. Spot cleaning may be possible, though.
One of the women (great reporter that I am, I didn't take notes or get names) wondered about the significance and source material of the white and gold thread patches, since they appear in several places. They're probably not from a tie; were they from a party dress? Something significant? Or was Nana Lord just being thrifty with a fabric she'd found?
As far as displaying it, hanging is definitely out. I wasn't keen on hanging it anyway -- where do you hang a worn, multicolored crazy quilt anyway? -- but I would like to have it out, somewhere. They suggested a quilt rack, and said I should make sure to refold it, in quarters, every so often so it wouldn't get creased. Which leads to another quilt mystery -- the thing does not crease. It has no batting inside, it's made from all these silks, you'd think it would be a mass of wrinkles, but no, it's always been iron-straight (except around the edges, where Nana Lord wasn't quite so careful sewing the new back on but, I repeat, the woman was in her 80s, cut her some slack).
My father thinks there was at least one quilt made per brother, and my mother believes Uncle John's was on a Spanish theme, since he and his wife went to Spain on their honeymoon. I have to dig up my scrapbook; the Ipswich Chronicle wrote about her quilts at one point and I have a copy of the article.
posted by Jenn at
2:47 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home