Postage Stamp quilt, Emma Wittwer Edie

Artwork Overview

Emma Wittwer Edie, Postage Stamp quilt
Emma Wittwer Edie
early 1940s
Postage Stamp quilt, early 1940s
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: cotton; piecing; quilting
Dimensions:
Object Length/Width (Length x Width): 78 1/2 x 88 in
Object Length/Width (Length x Width): 223.52 x 199.39 cm
Credit line: Gift of Barbara Kile Zernickow
Accession number: 1986.0244
Not on display

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label: "Quilts: A Thread of Modernism," Aug-2005, Debra Thimmesch and Barbara Brackman This pattern seems to have developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in southeastern Pennsylvania’s German communities, where it is called “Trip Around the World” or “Rainbow.” It is a variation of the larger category of Postage Stamp designs, pieced of squares so small they can be compared to stamps. The squares here are each about 1 1/8” and arranged in the four shades of each color, qualifying it as a “Rainbow” design in the Pennsylvania folk tradition. What began as a folk pattern was adopted by the commercial quilt pattern network fifty years later. In the 1930s and ‘40s, many magazines, needlework companies and retailers offered patterns and kits for variations of the design. The black, usually not found in the traditional Pennsylvania examples, was probably the inspiration of a commercial designer looking to add a dramatic contrast to the rainbow.