Postage Stamp quilt, Emma Wittwer Edie

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.