Variable Shading: An Aesthetic Choice

Christian McIntyre (?-1924), Scotland County, North Carolina

North Carolina project & the Quilt Index

A typical quilt from about 1900, done in the claret reds of the time, a

popular pattern usually called Single Wedding Ring today

Simple pattern in a fancy quilt

Published as Wedding Ring in Farm & Home magazine

in October 1887, according to Wilene Smith.

And then published by other sources. The Ladies' Art Company

probably influenced a good many quilters around the country.

Indiana Amish quilt, David Pottinger's collection

Quiltmakers after 1890 had many choices of innovative patterns, some of which like this one became quite a fad.

One could control the color carefully with two solids, a fashionable look at the time...

or add the variety of the scrapbag.

But there is something different going on in the quilt below.

Laura Louisa Griffith Dunlap (1861-1942) 

Kanawha County, West Virginia

Ca. 1920s

In the book West Virginia Quilts and Quiltmakers: Echoes from the Hills, Fawn Valentine called our attention to Laura's use of fabric, shading and repeat. 

 "The repeating pieced blocks are cut and stitched according to pattern but the fabric selection creates a variety of perceptual mutations. The pattern pieces are distinguished by shape, but not by value (dark or light)...no symmetrical balance. (pg 90)

  

The conventional shading

Variability

The photo in the book is much better than the one on the Quilt Index.

This is not one piecer's make-do attitude but a way of looking at pattern, as Fawn writes about another quilt, a "model of Scotch-Irish quiltmaking aesthetics, with the same value printed fabrics obscuring the details of the pieced blocks."

Gardenvale Stars

It's a look Jen Kingwell has captured for her

very popular contemporary patterns. Jen is from the far South,

Australia.

Recorded by the Wyoming Project

Purchased in an antique shop

Consistent shading

The Quilt Index has many quilts in the Single Wedding Ring pattern, most of them with no variability in shading, value or repeat (some have an occasional pattern error). But I knew where I could find quilts with variable shading like Laura Dunlap's. In the North Carolina project.

Agnora Bulloch Mclean, Robeson County North Carolina

Isabelle Maser Meadows, Stokes County, North Carolina

Is it a Southern thing?