Next Year's Civil War Block of the Month

Antebellum Album

2018 BOM

We are working on next year's BOM to be posted as a free pattern here at the Civil War Quilts blog.

The blocks will be pieced, drawn from designs popular for Antebellum Album quilts like this sampler found in the Connecticut project.

Antebellum is old-fashioned Latin for Before the War.

These signature quilts were a fashion after 1842, made by a generation of women who grew up before the Civil War to find their adult lives significantly different after 1861.

Unknown students and teachers, perhaps 1850s

We'll see them as schoolgirls and follow them into the 1860s and after.

School in Bardstown, Kentucky, 1860s

The narrative will focus on the cross-cultural influence of women's schools when Southerners traveled north for education and Northerners traveled south to teach.

I've asked four friends to piece the models and they've been busy. Becky Brown's planning some fussy-cutting from a romantic stash of reproduction pinks and blues

Mark Lauer is going to make two sets. One in red, green and yellow

repros.

Me--- I have set aside a stash of madder-style browns, reds, pinks

and oranges in the hopes that I'll have time to actually stitch

after I get all the patterns and stories written.

Denniele Bohannon is also doing pink and blue but with a very

contemporary slant.

Pat Styring's modern take includes "wordy"

fabrics in keeping with the school theme.

And Mark's second set will be pieced in reproductions of the black-ground

neons popular about 1910.

It all starts on January 31, 2018---the last Wednesday of each month.

Amanda Donohoe, Philomont, VA

signature on an 1849 Baltimore Album block.