Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Yankee Notions. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Yankee Notions. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Yankee Notions Blocks: Free Patterns

 



2020's pieced monthly pattern at CivilWarQuilts was Yankee Notions, in which we looked at cultural ideas across the Mason Dixon line and some tangible Yankee Notions, consumer necessities. Here are links to the monthly patterns so you can catch up with sewing and history.

Blocks 1-10 by Becky Brown
Introduction, Yardage and Set

Block #1 by Jean
Open Book

Block #2 by Cindy
Schoolhouse

Block #3 by Dena
Water Wheel

Block #4 by Stacy
New Water Wheel

Block #5 by Laura
New England

Block #6 by Sara
Improved Nine Patch

Block #7 by Elsie
Liberty Star

Block #8 by Sharon
Union Star

Block #9 by Susan
Yankee Puzzle

Block #10 by Dorry
Thrifty

Block #11 by Elsie
Modern Broken Dish

Block #12 by Catherine


You can also buy a 26-page color PDF and print it yourself for $12 at my Etsy shop.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/764615777/yankee-notions-2020-block-of-the-month?fbclid=IwAR3uelPqwou9jT1pXzlYLWTROD7V7o5ZHmT_9Vzv_pUSpsi90TXgFjVTs9k



Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Yankee Notions: Finished Samplers

Erica Cannon has her Yankee Notions top done.
 She's standing on a ladder because she made two of some
 blocks to make a larger quilt.

Several stitchers have finished their sampler of the twelve blocks
from our 2020 Block of the Month Yankee Notions.

Ginny Bresette

Twelve blocks with monthly tales about Yankee Notions---
philosophical, cultural and tangible---versus Southern Notions.

Ginny's first block

The stories tell us about a large and diverse country with some
very different cultural baggage we carry into the 21st century.

Jean Etheridge's is quilted & bound.

She found the perfect Yankee Notions print

Dena Brannen

The bird print is a feature in each of Dena's blocks.

Shawn Priggel's--Cheddar and black and white



Denniele Bohannon's;
Quilting by Becky Collis

Sara Reimer Farley used a spool as a cornerstone
in her sashing.

Each of her blocks has an appliqued Yankee Notion, scissors, sewing machine, etc.

Sewing Bird

Becky Brown's red, white and blue model.
She often makes quilts for veterans. Lucky family
to get this one.

Carol Cook Morton's

Lisa Wagner

Lisa used a spool print throughout the blocks.

Catherine Lennox

Stripes & plaids

Dorry Emmer's #1. She made model blocks in two palettes.
This one sashed with prints featuring sewing notions.


Denniele's second model. 18" Blocks

Here's a post to a link with all the patterns:

This year's pieced BOM is Hands All Around: Alcotts at War.
Block #2 next Wednesday.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Yankee Notions #1: Open Book

Yankee Notions #1
Open Book by Denniele Bohannon
12"


We'll begin the Yankee Notions series with a block about the idea of literacy and the value New Englanders have placed on education since the first Puritans landed.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law requiring parents and masters to teach children to read as early as 1642. New England was home to the first colonial colleges and also to the 19th-century principle of common schools with the Yankee notions that education should be universal, non-sectarian and free.

Yankee schoolteachers spread these ideas in the South before, during and after the Civil War.

Yankee schoolteacher Laura Towne (1825-1901) with 
Dick, Maria and Amoretta in Union-occupied 
South Carolina sometime after 1862.


Graphic showing the proportion of illiteracy in the states in 1850, from an 1870 Report by the Commissioner of Education based on the censuses. Dots do not show numbers but rather proportions with New Hampshire and Connecticut having the fewest people who cannot read as a basis for comparison.
"Wherever the Yankee soldier has tramped the Yankee Schoolmarm will teach. Noble and chivalric gentlemen may throw stones at her windows, burn her schoolhouse, drive her from their neighborhood; but she reappears---she, or her cousin...." Atlantic Monthly 1869.


Southerners, of course, resented the often-heard criticism that they were ignorant and illiterate. Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut took delight in describing the spelling errors found in  letters scattered on battlefields among the dead soldiers.
"Free schools are not everything, as witness this spelling. Yankee epistles from camp show how illiterate they can be, with all their boasted schools. Fredericksburg is spelled 'Fredrexbirg,' medicine, 'metison'...."
Western Female Institute, Ohio

The concept of free public schools was a Yankee Notion that divided the country, as was the idea of public taxes to support those schools. Schools cost money; good schools cost lots of money. Who is willing to pay for it?

Virginia Governor William B. Giles (1762-1830) spoke for many when he criticized the Jeffersonian ideal of  public education. Schooling the boys of Virginia would make them unfit for farm and other manual labor that was their lot; hiring teachers would create a voting class with a special interest in the high taxes schools demanded and it was not fair to levy taxes on one taxpayer to benefit another's child.
The Block

Chocolate & Cinnamon traditions

BlockBase #2597 has been published with many names over the past century. Open Book is from a catalog identified as Needlecraft Supply in the 1930s.

The pattern is older. The block above is dated 1872.
Sorry about the Y seams.

Each month you'll get patterns for two sizes: 12" or 18" Blocks.

12" Block

A - Cut 4 parallelograms from a strip 3-1/2" wide at 45 degrees. The base should be 6-3/4" long.
B - Cut 1 square 7-1/4". Cut into four triangles with two diagonal cuts.

C - Cut 1 square 6-1/2".


18" Block
A - Cut 4 parallelograms from a strip 5" wide at 45 degrees. The base should be 9-3/4" long.
B - Cut 1 square 10-1/4". Cut into four triangles with two diagonal cuts.

C - Cut 1 square 9-1/2".


How-To




Open Book by Dorry Emmer
She's using some notions fabric in one set of blocks.

A Tangible Yankee Notion
Thimble


Thimbles (the German word is Fingerhut which explains the concept nicely) have been around since humans invented needles. Made of various materials, particularly leather and metals, they can be hand made or manufactured. 


Manufactured metal thimbles were one of the sewing notions a Yankee Peddler would carry to housewife customers north and south.

The Peddler's Wagon by Charles Green Bush, Harper's Weekly, 1868

Thimbles commemorating Queen Victoria's
ascension to the throne and her 60th Jubilee.


Open Book by Dorry Emmer
Dorry added a frame to spotlight her flying creatures fabric in
her second set of blocks.

Open Book by Becky Brown

And Becky added pieces in the center square to make it a 3-color block.

Denniele is doing two sets, one 12" and this one 18".
She says that 9" square in the center needed more pattern so she cut strips:
Cut 4 orange 1-1/2" x 9-1/2" strips
Cut 5 white 1-1/2" x 9-1/2" strips
Alternating colors, piece the nine strips together.
Sign at the German Fingerhut Museum