Quilt Top, Crazy pattern

Unknown

ca. 1885 · Silk, satin, velvet, and cotton · The American Wing

By the mid-1880s, crazy quilts were so popular that enterprising manufacturers offered them in ready-to-sew kits, which often included appliqués. This practice explains the strangely uniform quality of many crazy quilts, and makes those crazy quilts that are not formulaic seem all the more extraordinary. Each block of this quilt top is designed with unusual patterns, and the blocks seem to be composed of real scraps. There are some commercially produced elements, such as the cats and some of the embroidered motifs, which were probably marked with patterns, but the original aspects of this piece make it stand apart from the run-of-the-mill crazy quilts that exist in great numbers today.

Artist

Unknown

Date

ca. 1885

Medium

Silk, satin, velvet, and cotton

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Gift of Tracey Blumenreich Zabar, 1989