Show uilts Q The Collection of the Museum of American Folk Art ELIZABETH V. WARREN lthough they are called quilts, the textiles in the Museum of American Folk Art's upcoming exhibition "Victorian Vernacular: The American Show Quilt" were never meant to be used as functional bedcovers, and they were usually not quilted. One might be carefully placed on a bed for decorative effect or draped over the back of a sofa, but it was never slept under, laundered, or treated like its utilitarian cotton cousin. Rather, a show quilt was intended to demonstrate its maker's good taste and her knowledge of popular decorative trends. To keep her family warm at night, a quiltmaker in the second half of the nineteenth century could purchase blankets and woven coverlets from mail-order catalogs or the local store. But to keep her house looking up to date, she made a show quilt out of silk or fine wool. Quilts made of silk were created in America during the late eighteenth century, but what is generally considered the silk "show quilt" tradition probably began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of economic, social, and aesthetic factors contributed to the great popularity of the show quilt. First was the basic availability of the materials. At midcentury, silk—once too rare and expensive for the average quiltmaker— was both attainable and affordable because of the expansion of the China trade; at this time it began to replace cotton as the stylish person's fabric of choice for dresses and quilts. During
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this period, there developed a silk show quilt style that was parallel to the calico quilt style. By the 1880s, the height of popularity for the show quilts, silk fabric was being mass-produced domestically (though the yarn still had to be imported from China). In the early twentieth century, the price of silk began to rise again (partly because of the Chinese civil war) and the show quilt tradition, already on the wane due to a change in fashion, suffered even more because of a decline in the availability of the necessary fabrics. The popularity of the silk show quilt can also be traced to the influence of the periodicals of the day. In 1850, Godey's Lady's Book published a pattern for silk patchwork, and for the rest of the nineteenth century most of the editors of the fashionconscious publications advocated the silk show quilt style as opposed to the old-fashioned cotton patchwork. Mrs. Pullan, an English author and needleworker who came to the United States to be the director of the handiwork department of Frank Leslie's MAP QUILT Magazine, wrote Quiltmaker unidentified in 1859 that cotVirginia 1886 (dated) ton patchwork Embroidered silks including was "not worth velvet and brocade either candle or 783 / 4 82/ 1 4" Museum of American Folk Art gas light." HowGift of Dr. and Mrs. C. David ever, little bits of McLaughlin expensive silk, 1987.1.1