The Rickrack Rag

Tomorrow is Halloween, so I guess today is Halloween ee’n….. also the day before our 14th anniversary. For Halloween, I’d love to show feedsacks with jack o’lanterns, ghosts, goblins and witches, but I don’t know of any - nary even a black cat! So barring those, I’ve chosen some sacks in some of the scarcest colors in feedsacks - orange and black.

Orange occurs rather more frequently in floral and other patterns, but as a background or predominant color, is hard to find. Even less common, though, and perhaps more useful in quilting and other design work, is the black background - so again we’ve also settled for sacks where black is at least the dominant color.

Have a happy Halloween, everyone!

In the world of antique and vintage quilts, you truly never know what you’ll find next. Here in Pennsylvania, we know we’ll always see a certain number of beautifully crafted antique quilts in any number of traditional patterns, and many of these can be truly astonishing in their beauty and workmanship. But we have a place in our hearts for the unusual, and have presented a few of them here in the past.

This week we found a quilt unlike any of the traditional PA quilts we’re used to; in fact, it resembles much more closely those quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama that have been so widely celebrated since their discovery a few years back. And like those quilts, this one is delightful for its originality, its exuberance and joy in the use of what were obviously scraps of cast off material to create a thing of utility and beauty.

It’s a heavy quilt, quite warm no doubt, constructed of mostly brightly colored corduroys. But there are numerous other fabrics included as well, from wool army blanket to 1970’s poly knits. It’s not quilted, but tied with strings or heavy thread in blue and red. And as if it weren’t enough to have pieced all these various fabrics together in these colorful variously sized arrays, rather than finding larger pieces for a backing, the quiltmaker has pieced another joyful top!

This reverse side clearly shows the ends of the ties, and features a somewhat cooler palette than the front, but is otherwise every bit its equal in originality and creative use of scrap fabrics. On both sides are strips of fabric clearly added in order to make squares of various sizes fit together, and other strips to square off the whole, but there’s a freedom apparent in the sheer variety of fabrics, patterns, shapes and colors that belies the cohesiveness of the final product.

Because it’s so different from everything else we find here, so unfamiliar to us in every way, we don’t quite know what to make of this quilt. But we can’t help smiling when we look at it, and that’s a good thing. And the more we compare it to those famous quilts of rural southern black communities, the more it seems to us to resemble them, to be representative at least of that tradition. Barring the unlikely discovery of where it originated and how it came to be here, we are left with little else but conjecture. That said, in the world of quilt history we often use a certain amount of conjecture along with our knowledge of fabrics and historical data to determine a probable origin, etc. So while we obviously cannot tell the name, locale, skin color or even the gender of the maker of this quilt, it certainly bears comparison to the housetops quilts of Gee’s Bend and other rural southern communities.

And as I said, it sure makes us smile to look at it!

We’ve had our first frost here now, the outdoor growing season is at an end. Luckily for those of us who love feedsacks, we’re able to carry our flowers around with us on our fabrics! One other way to keep our flowers and plants past the frost is to have them in portable pots and planters, and these, too, are represented on feedsacks. Here’s an assortment of potted plants:

Potted plants seem to turn up with a lot of other kitchen items on feedsacks as well - I could have included the first two in last week’s post about aprons, since they depict little aprons in their scene…

We’ll probably see a few of these again if we do Feedsack Friday with other kitchen themes, but we thought we’d better get those plants in out of the cold.

Once again we’ve bought a quilt we weren’t expecting at an auction. In fact, there were several quilts prominently displayed at this particular sale, none of them particularly intriguing. But since we look for a lot more than just quilts at an auction, we stayed for the duration, buying a bunch of tea towels, framed prints and needlepoints, and sundry other textile items. At some point, the auctioneer said, “Now we have a quilted baby blanket.”
Looking up, expecting to see a crib pad or some other machine made cover, we were surprised by this:

Not exactly what we’d call a baby blanket, rather a bars pattern crib quilt. All solid colors, the reds and the black are wools, the blue is cotton. And it’s beautifully hand quilted in dark thread. To us, this looks suspiciously like an Amish quilt, in pattern, fabrics and quilting design. And the fabrics are not new. There’s a little damage - some small moth bites and some whitish paint/glue that we haven’t really tried hard to remove, until we figure out if it’s safe to do so.

It is hard to understand why a Berks County auction would have a quilt like this, practically hidden away, while it openly presented other mediocre offerings. Again, we were able to buy it for practically nothing. Are we missing something? Are little treasures like this one really just a dime a dozen?? If they are, I guess we’ll probably end up with dozens of them!

Today we got the November issue of Country Living Magazine in the mail - and there’s a feature article on aprons. One of the aprons shown is this one:

Made from feedsack, this one’s featured as an example of 1930’s style aprons. Aprons were one of the many popular uses for feedsacks, and there were certainly many of them made. Here’s a selection of some of our favorites:

We think that feedsack probably accounts for a third of the bib aprons we see around here, fewer of the shorties.

There are always a few available on our site: Sharon’s Vintage Aprons

Missed last week again, but we’re back this week with another edition of Feedsack Friday. This week’s topic is Autumn Leaves. Many, many feedsacks have flowers with leaves, trees with leaves, etc., but we’re featuring sacks this week with just leaves, no flowers or other objects. You’ll find that the color scheme is far more varied than what Mother Nature offers us in the annual north to south redecorating of our woodlands. Here are several colorways each of some feedsacks with smaller leaves:

These leaves are a bit larger, and seem to have picked up some spots.

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