Tuesday, June 30, 2009

string quilt foundations

Perhaps this will be of interest to no one, but the foundations of the string quilt blocks were almost as interesting to me as the fronts. Norm said that they had cut up a Montgomery Wards catalog for most of the blocks, though I did find some that were pieced to newspapers.
I know two girls that would love the dog and cat for sale in the upper right block.
Had to take a photo of this one for my little Trixie - even though she spells her given name with an 'x', not 'ce'. Not so sure she'll ever be a "pre-eminent counselor on social decorum" either. Not as long as she keeps pulling her dress up over her head in public.

I would kill for one of these bikes.

Some of the paper was about to fall off like these. On most I had to rip it bit by bit. Removing the foundations took almost as long as putting the blocks together.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single date on any of the papers. Any guesses as to the year?
Tomorrow - the finished top.
Posted by Picasa

5 comments:

Harriet M. Welsch said...

Well, lets see if we can figure this out. Beatrice Fairfax, the pseudonym of Marie Manning, was the original "Dear Abby." She started writing her column for the NY Evening Journal in 1898 and kept writing until her death in 1945. So that reins it in to a half century. She was a fascinating character. There's a pretty good article about her here. I would guess from the style of the phone and the bicycle that we're looking at something in the 1920s, but I'm not entirely sure about that -- it's definitely not my area of expertise, although I do spend a fair amount of time working with newspapers of that era. If you have the name of the newspaper from which your Beatrice Fairfax column comes, I might be able to narrow it down further.

Rebekah said...

What an awesome treasure!

jenny said...

Like Harriet, I also thought the best clue to the date would be the Beatrice Fairfax column. The Wisconsin State Journal from Thursday, February 28, 1935, has a column that starts with the same string of keywords, but I don't have access to the full article to see for sure.

It's really a wonderful find.

Carol said...

This is awesome, both the photographs you share and the detectives in the comments. I imagine a book out of this.

And in honor of your dress lifting, decorum lacking Trixie, my WV is "undis," Latin for undies.

Wendy said...

Harriet - WOW, just WOW. I forgot that you're a research queen.

Jenny - You also amaze me. Never occurred to me to reference the column.

All I saw were toys, toys, toys!

I'll have to ask Norm for any other information he has on these pieces I wonder if this was something that Shirley bought as an unfinished project and then worked on it more herself. If it's as old as the paper seems to suggest, she may have been too young to have started it.