Crazy quilts displayed at county museum

A collection of colorful quilts can be seen at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum through a temporary exhibit on display until the end of April.

Showcasing a style called crazy quilting, the exhibit is a partnership between the museum and the Sweetwater County Quilt Guild.

According to the museum's curator Amanda Benson, the quilts took their inspiration from the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia. The fair's Japanese Pavilion had a number of modern art pieces on display in a multitude of colors. This display influenced quilt makers visiting the fair, who decided to replicate the artwork in their quilts.

Benson said the earliest quilts were made from silk and the quilts were generally limited to women in the upper classes. The quilts became more widely available to middle-class women when textile companies would sell leftover scraps of fabric through mail-order services.

The quilts and the time spent on sewing them were often criticized by men at the time. One newspaper clipping included with the exhibit reasoned if women would spend the 1,500 hours building a crazy quilt into pursuing other activities like politics, they could have a great deal of impact. Women did not have voting rights during the height of the crazy quilt's popularity.

"It was just a silly argument they were trying to make when women didn't have any rights," Benson said.

Benson said crazy quilts were also the inspiration of a colorful member of Batman's rogue's gallery. The villain Crazy-Quilt wears a costume inspired by how fabrics were joined together in the quilts. He was a master thief who was blinded in a botched robbery and volunteered for an experimental surgery that would return his eyesight, but in a way that only allowed him to see in vivid, bright colors -- which quickly drove him insane.

Benson said the quilts themselves were in fashion until 1910 and many of the earliest surviving crazy quilts are quickly deteriorating. Benson said this is due to silk fabrics being treated with metallic salts prior to being sold.

Silk was sold by weight at the time and the degumming process used to remove the sticky sericin from raw silk improved the quality of the silk, but reduced the weight. Textile manufacturers found if they treated silks in a solution of metallic salt, they could add the weight lost in degumming and improve the silk's shine. The consequence of this treatment makes the silk more fragile as it ages, causing silk to become brittle and shatter.

Benson said this is a common problem with silk garments from the era. The museum has a silk crazy quilt in its collection, but its fragile nature prohibited it from being included in the display.

The partnership with the quilt guild came about after Benson hosted an after hours quilt presentation with members of the guild. Along with pieces from the museum's collection, modern interpretations created by quilt guild members are also on display, with personal notes included with the displays to explain the inspiration behind the quilts.

For Benson, she wasn't aware of crazy quilts until she discovered the quilts in the museum's collection. While working with the quilt guild, she continued to discover more information about the quilting style's history and eventually decided to take up a crazy quilt project of her own.

 

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