I got the quilt out.
(It was still dark out when I took these photos so I didn't even bother considering to take it out and peg it on the clothesline like I often do to photograph quilt tops). There are two small holes (that I've found so far) in the pink backing, but I can fix those, and there's one worn spot on one of the printed patches, which I think I'll probably darn.
It's interesting in that the quilter did a sort of "gradient" of fabrics. I don't know if that was an intentional plan, or if she (I'm assuming it's a she; years back nearly all people who pieced quilts were) just put the quilt together as she completed blocks. Or if she was trying to separate the fabrics that "matched less."
As I said before, the color combination is a bit unusual and probably would not appeal to someone buying the top merely for decorative value, but for me, the interest is in the age of the fabrics and their prints and the top, even with the wonky color combination, is not without charm.
Here are most of the fabrics in close-up:
Turquoise and purple seemed to be a popular mid-century color combination for fabrics; I've seen a lot of older fabrics with these colors together. I like the combination. Also, a lot of feed sack prints have these kind of geometric designs on them. (I'm assuming the fabrics are feed sack based on the weave and the style of the prints. If I were really motivated I could go to some of the various feed-sack websites that are out there and see if I could match any of them up. It's my understanding there's pretty extensive documentation of feed sacks out there).
This is a pictorial scene, probably intended to be Mexican or Southwest. It shows up very poorly in the photograph but some of the red shapes are long dresses on women. There are also cacti and what look like palm trees and adobe buildings and small figures of "peasants". It's mostly a grey and red print and the grey doesn't show up well in photographs.
I think this is my favorite fabric in the quilt, because it's so bright. It's sort of shields with palm trees and then a background of those rosette-like things. You wonder what kind of mood the fabric designer was shooting for, what they intended the fabric to be used for (like Hawaiian shirts?)
And then, finally, there are the more "conventional pretties" - floral prints (and one has grey butterflies in it as well). These are sort of typical of what I've seen for the floral-print feed sacks.
Feedsacks fascinate me. (For the non-quilters in the audience: yes, these were actual cloth bags that (mostly) animal feed came in, years back. Several of the companies got the idea of printing the fabric with designs - both as an enticement for people to buy their brand, and so that people could recycle the sacks after the feed was used. One website with a little information is the Quilt History website)
They started being offered in the 1920s (another feedsack history site). They probably were most popular (from what I've read) from the 30s through the early 50s, but continued to be printed into the 1960s.
I think I'm fascinated by them because they seem to me to be from such a vanished world, and yet, they are really not from that long ago. (My mother talks about wearing dresses made from feedsacks when she was young.). Also, it's one of those things that makes me smile because it was sort of "unnecessary." The manufacturers did not HAVE to print pretty patterns on the bag - they could have (as many did in the early years), just sell plain white cloth sacks with the manufacturer's name printed on them. (Many women wrote of wearing bloomers made of these sacks when they were little girls, and the embarrassment if their dress flipped up and revealed the logo). But they decided to do it - because it appealed to people, and because it allowed the natural frugality of the times to take on a little bit of happiness. (I don't know about you but I'd rather recycle a pretty printed cotton sack than a plain white one).
In my mind, it's kind of similar to that brand of laundry soap (I think it was?) that used to package things like hand towels in their boxes. (I KNOW there was. I remember my grandmother showing me some of the small bathroom hand towels she had and telling me she got them with soap powder. ETA: It was Breeze detergent that did that.)
Companies don't do that any more. (It's even rare, any more, to find a cereal box with a prize inside. And that was a big big deal when I was a kid. It makes me a little sad to think that there may be kids today who never get the experience of a "prize inside.") I suppose it saves money for the company (and increases profits for the shareholders), but it does make me a little sad - as all "cutting things to the bone" makes me a little sad. (I hate "petty oeconomies" - to quote Trollope)
I also like feed sacks because the colors - even though some of them may seem a little gaudy - appeal to me. I think part of it really is that some of my sense of taste, of what appeals to me, was formed by the summers spent at my maternal grandmother's home, where little in the way of decoration had changed since the 1950s or so, and where she still had textiles going back to my own mother's childhood.
Another interesting tidbit about feed sacks: before the 1948 presidential election, the Staley company (IIRC) conducted what they called a "pullet poll" (using the sacks for their chicken feed). Half of the sacks where printed up with a Democratic paper label; half with a Republican paper label. Purchasing a sack with a particular label counted as a "vote" in the poll.
The interesting thing is - you might remember, 1948 was the Dewey-Truman race, and most of the newspaper polls were predicting Dewey would win (so much so that there's the famous photo of the victorious Truman holding up a newspaper that says "Dewey Defeats Truman" and grinning as he does). But the "pullet poll" was actually accurate: they predicted that Truman would win!
(The book where I found that, the author said she believed it was because the newspapers polled mostly urban, Easterners - the sort of person that Dewey was - whereas Truman was a Midwesterner and he did a lot of "stumping" in the farm communities. And probably the farmers "understood" him better and liked him better than they did Dewey. Probably also - I don't know how polls were done in those days but if they were telephone polls, I think a lot of rural areas still didn't have much phone service then.)
More sites on feed sacks:
Quilter's Muse (That looks like an interesting site in general; they also have a blog that I will have to check out)
Feedbags: from rags to riches
Quilt made of novelty fabrics, probably some from feed sacks. LOTS of novelty-type fabrics were printed on feedsacks - both travel prints (like the two I have), and "boy's prints" (Western scenes, sports scenes), and cute animals, and one company was even licensed to use images from Disney on feed sacks.
***
One other thing I did last night was something I almost never do.
I painted my fingernails. I had been planning on doing my toes...I often do in the summer when I'm running around in sandals a lot of the time, but I decided to do my fingers too this time. (The toes are the same color). I may come to hate it and have it get all chipped and take it off in a couple days - I don't know for sure how successfully one can sew and such for extended periods of time (though I did hand-quilt some last night without any problems) without chipping the heck out of the polish.
The photo (and my hands) make me smile because they look like little-girl hands to me with such short nails. But I find that that's actually the ideal "practical" length for me - for one thing, if they are much longer than that, they "click" on the piano keys when I play and that bugs me. And for another reason: when my nails are much longer, I often break them or catch them on things and wind up having to cut them even SHORTER than they are here, and that can hurt until they grow back some.
So I don't know. I may keep the painted nails, at least until the heavy soil-involved fieldwork starts up again. (Yes, I COULD wear gloves, but it's over 100 degrees here right now and I would rather de-polish my nails than wear latex gloves for fieldwork.)
