Strip Quilt

The strong verticals of this strip quilt glory in the decorative effects of its ombré fabrics. A marvel of modern science, for a very brief period such rainbow printed textiles were wildly in vogue for dresses and shawls. Patching and superfluous seams within this quilt’s strips reveal that the two fabrics used here had indeed previously been part of dresses. However, rainbow prints fell out of favor just as suddenly as they entered it, and will have been considered very old-fashioned by the mid-century. Perhaps the anonymous seamstress who so carefully assembled this quilt from old scraps appreciated the rainbow prints’ decorative potential as strong verticals for this work; perhaps she chose to salvage and reuse these two distinctive printed fabrics because of a special nostalgia or sentimental association with the garments they originally composed.