Antique Quilt lecture and display deserves a blogpost!

The April 2018 program meeting was another wonderful offering by chapter member Lyna Wiggins, an authority on antique quilts, an appraiser, and a replicate quilt expert.  

As always her explanation of patterns, dyes, the history of the times, was a great treat as well as an education.  We asked a lot of questions, and her detailed answers showed us she is simply an encyclopedic resource on this whole area of fiber art. 


Holding up the quilt were Ginny, visible here and there, herself an expert on antique fabrics, and a fine quilter, 

Holding up the quilts were Ginny, visible here and there, herself an expert on antique fabrics, and a fine quilter, and at the other corner, Carol P, who was out of sight of your photographer!


Lyna brought a couple of her favorite reference books for us to see, including one in which a quilt from her own collection is featured 

The pictures show only a fraction of what we saw, an array which covered the mid nineteenth to mid twentieth century in American quilt arts.  So here are some

 This is, as you'll see from the hands helpfully holding it, thank you Carol G and Mari, a miniature quilt

  
But this one is enormous, and brilliantly designed, fully under control while depicting a swirling mass of movement
 

 Lyna particularly loves the schoolhouse design and we saw several fine examples of it

Here's a quilt with the corner flipped over to show you the back. Backs of quilts can be interesting, too.

One aspect of Lyna's collecting is that she likes to find genuine antique quilt tops, that is quilts where the top is complete, but it was not backed and quilted.  With an unquilted top you can see the back of the work and how it was designed and finished, of great interest to embroiderers as well as quilters. Thank you so much, Lyna, for another wonderful adventure in the quilt art world.


And as a little extra, here's a quilt new member Mari M. created from a drawing of her mother's. 

Mari is an expert quilter, creating and documenting wonderful works for family members, and very welcome to our chapter.

And another (fairly) new member, Saasha B., is an expert fine cross stitch worker. 

This piece is the start of a very large and wonderful design, in extremely fine stitching, I believe 40 count.  She's a cross stitch star! We're in awe of her skills.