Not the needlework or the design per se, but the material...
In 1856, a 17-year-old girl named Adeline Harris started making a unique quilt. Over the next two decades, she sent pieces of silk to famous people from around the world and they signed them and sent them back to her. She assembled them into a quilt with a tumbling blocks pattern (aka, the Q*bert pattern).The signatures that Harris was able to acquire are astounding: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Alexandre Dumas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander von Humboldt, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, and eight US Presidents: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Via Kottke.
Just about every block as a dot sig! And the pattern is cool, too.
ReplyDeleteWhat's a dot sig?
DeleteMaybe too early for Mark Twain?
ReplyDeleteI checked the excellent pdf at the Met Museum - neither Twain nor Clemens is mentioned in the detailed analysis of the quilt.
Deletehttps://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/a_marvel_of_womans_ingenious_and_intellectual_industry_the_metropolitan_museum_journal_v_33_1998
'dot sig' is short for the Unix file ".signature". Unix programs (mailers, newsreaders, etc.) use that to attach the contents of that signature file at the end of a mail message or posting. Since that quilt has a signature in almost every box, it seemed appropriate to make a funny-ha-ha by using a 1970s computer term to refer to the signatures collected 100 years earlier.
ReplyDeletep.s. Way too over the heads of everyone? Too bad. :-)
Lol, even with your explanation I have no idea how to parse the phrase "Just about every block as a dot sig".
Delete"Just about every block as a dot sig". s/b "Just about every block has a dot sig".
ReplyDelete