Little Girls and Quilting

Yippee! I'm excited to let you  know that the second pattern for the American Schoolgirl Club - Martha Washington's Star Quilt -  has been mailed out to many of you! I actually stayed focused and, even though it's late, it's still technically July so I consider that pretty good considering everything I went through this month. I got sick on July 1 and went to the ER that day. What an absolutely exhausting month it was for me.  Hope this doesn't mean I'm getting old and I've lost my ability to bounce back like I used to. I'm still pretty tired.

So keep an eye on your mailboxes in the coming week (maybe "weeks" for those of you in Canada, Europe and Australia, unfortunately). This little quilt is a treasure and will be a lot of fun to make with your red and blue print scraps.

Thinking about and making doll quilts keeps me young, however, I think. If you follow my blog and books at all, most of you know by now that doll quilts were often used as practice for young girls' sewing skills in the past.

Needlework and sewing were an important part of a girl's education in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sometimes these skills were taught before reading and writing.

Doll quilts were learning pieces. It was the practicing of the sewing skills that was important, not so much the design of the quilt.

I like to think that, like early quilters, even young girls making small quilts for their dolls learned a little about color and the whole design process and it helped to give life to their creative expression in a small way.

(From the book Amish Doll Quilts by Rachel and Kenneth Pellman)

(From the book Amish Doll Quilts by Rachel and Kenneth Pellman)

(From the book Amish Doll Quilts by Rachel and Kenneth Pellman)

Some antique doll quilts were made by adults for children - out of love for the child for sure. And those can be exquisite and rare, as well as expensive. But the ones that I'm really drawn to are the ones made by children themselves - simple, unpretentious, with imperfect stitches, where you can see the frustration of trying to master the skill. Often crudely sewn. I bought this quilt fragment a little while ago because I loved that about the unevenly sewn nine-patches. Maybe it was a doll quilt in the making. More likely it was made by an adult learning to stitch by hand, but when I find the right borders I'll probably turn it into a doll quilt someday.

Here are the only 2 antique doll quilts I own and I love them for their simplicity (and the price was right too!)

A few years ago I had my daughter practice some straight stitching on the sewing machine - making little four-patch blocks from some of my reproduction fabric squares. She lost interest quickly--"that's your thing, mom" and we never did anything with them but I often think of turning them into a doll quilt to keep tucked away for her daughter someday.  
 

 

For now, I'll keep designing and making scrappy doll quilts for myself (and all of YOU too, of course). Maybe they'll be valuable to someone someday. And if not, that's ok. Like little girls' sewing samples, they were my own little learning projects over the years. It's fun to see how far I've come.

 

 (Schoolgirl Club quilt # 1- Eliza Jane's Nine Patch)

I love this quilt!