Welcome to Patchwork Mania! I’ll be posting about my estate-sale finds, as well as creations of my own and those of my friends and relatives.
My first post in the new Patchwork Mania section of my blog is this beautiful version of the pattern often known as Victorian Fan. It has other names too, like Grandmother’s Fan and Formosa Fan. I indeed found it at an estate sale, for not very much money, and I had to rescue it. Someone’s mother or grandmother or great-grandmother made it long ago and there it sat, languishing unloved among random estate-sale wares.
It’s very thin, just the patchwork layer and a plain white backing layer, with no batting in between. This makes me think it was intended for decorative purposes, as a spread, rather than to provide an extra layer of warmth, as was the case with many quilts in the past.
It’s also really large, double bed size. Here it’s on a twin bed and the extra fabric on each side reaches almost to the floor.
The variety of fabrics is wonderful. Clearly the quilt’s creator had saved leftover fabric from many many projects and frugally used it here.
This fan uses an assortment of sweet pastel flower prints, very old-fashioned. (The quilt is quite faded, as you can see here.)
This fan uses sweet pastel flower prints too, but also a few with a mid-century “moderne” vibe. Based on the presence of those fabrics, I’d guess that this quilt is maybe seventy years old. It’s quite possible to buy replica fabrics, reproducing the designs of previous eras, and many quilt-makers like to make quilts that evoke the quilts of the past. But this quilt is so faded and worn, that I think it’s really that old.
Here’s another fan, with a piece cut from the same mid-century print fabric that we see above.
The red dye used in the fabric here must have been very fade-resistant to remain bright all this time.
Another sign of the quilt’s age is the fact that the fabric has disintegrated in spots. In a quilt pieced together from odds and ends of leftover fabric, and even fabric salvaged from clothes that have already been worn until they are worn out, it’s not unusual to find disintegrating spots–and it’s interesting to see that some fabrics are much more resilient than others.Looking at the spots where the quilt top has worn through, it’s easy to see that there’s no batting between the top and the backing.
I love the pastel green that the quilt’s maker used for the fans’ bases. Luckily she had enough of that fabric to make them all the same, offering a nice counterpoint to the wide variety of prints and colors in the fans themselves. She also used the pastel green for the sweet border that edges the quilt.
The quilt is all hand-sewn, with tiny, precise stitches. It’s also literally quilted, with tiny hand stitches anchoring the quilt top to the backing. The stitches follow the outlines of patchwork pieces, but they also add little flourishes, notably these fleur-de-lis patterns that appear in the fan bases.
The fleur-de-lis also appear in the white spaces at the tops of the fans, white on white and barely visible, but a lovely detail.
Here’s a final picture. Thank you, anonymous and long-lost quilt maker!
