Yankee Notions #10: Thrifty

Yankee Notions #10: Thrifty by Denniele Bohannon

This simple nine-patch with four-patches in the corners can symbolize

the quilt's iconic role as a thrifty craft.

From the collections of Historic New England

While Southerners might view Yankees as avaricious and miserly

Northerners liked to think of themselves as thrifty.

"What's more thrifty than a scrappy quilt?" ask those who've never paid $12.50 for a yard of fabric.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the New England villain in many a Southern mind, gave readers a "little preliminary instruction" in regional quilt traditions in her 1859 book The Minister's Wooing.

"The good wives of New England, impressed with that thrifty orthodoxy of economy which forbids to waste the merest trifle, had a habit of saving every scrap clipped out in the fashioning of household garments, and these they cut into fanciful pattems and constructed of these rainbow shapes and quaint traceries, the arrangement of which became one of their few fine arts. Many a maiden, as she sorted and arranged fluttering bits of green, yellow, red, and blue, felt rising in her breast a passion for somewhat vague and unknown, which came out at length in a new pattern of patchwork. 

Lockport Batting booklet 1930s

Thanks, Harriet, for the durable imagery

of Colonial New England

"Collections of these tiny fragments were always ready to fill an hour when there was nothing else to do; and as the maiden chatted with her beau, her busy flying needle stitched together those pretty bits, which, little in themselves, were destined, by gradual unions and accretions, to bring about at last substantial beauty, warmth, and comfort,— emblems thus of that household life which is to be brought to stability and beauty by reverent economy in husbanding and tact in arranging the little useful and agreeable morsels of daily existence."

Where is Dorothy Parker when you need her?

The Block

 Thrifty by Becky Brown

The simple arrangement is not something you see in the 19th century.

 It was first published in the Kansas City Star in 1939.

Cutting the 12" Finished Block

A - Cut 16 squares 2-1/2"

B - Cut 5 squares 4-1/2"

Cutting the 18" Finished Block

A - Cut 16 squares 3-1/2"

B - Cut 5 squares 6-1/2"

Thrifty by Dorry Emmer

Thrifty by Denniele Bohannon

Denniele used Connecting Threads Color Wheel Solids for her two versions of Yankee Notions.

See that color wheel here:

    https://www.connectingthreads.com/cfPromo/nv7/colorwheelsolids.cfm?intmedid=CWSLearnNV7 

This Month's Tangible Yankee Notion 

Penny Banks

The first cast-iron mechanical bank, manufactured

by Connecticut's Stevens Foundry in 1869.

New Englander Benjamin Franklin told us in 1758 that "A penny saved is a penny got.” And the place to keep them was in a penny bank.

A politician hiding your money in a Stevens bank

from the 1870s

This collectible cast iron bank may cost you more

than your last actual sewing machine.

Thrifty by Dorry Emmer

This isn't a bank, it's a cast iron toy sewing machine. Turn the crank the

woman sews. 

Later sewing machine bank

Becky Brown's 1-10

Two blocks to go