British Mania

Editor's Note: To celebrate the upcoming grand opening of the newly expanded Quilt House gallery, International Quilt Study Center & Museum team members are blogging about pieces in the gallery's inaugural exhibition, "Getting to Know You."

Medallion, maker unknown, probably made in Allendale region,
England, United Kingdom, circa 1830. IQSCM 2007.014.0001.

By Laura Chapman
Communications Coordinator

I have been a bit of an anglophile since middle school, when I watched Sliding Doors and Notting Hill. That was about the same time my dad introduced me to Monty Python's Flying Circus, and I watched a multi-part documentary on Beatlemania with my parents. That probably prompted me to spend high school reading everything by Helen Fielding, Lisa Jewell, and Jane Austen. By the time I went to college, I knew I was a bit obsessed.

Imagine my excitement when the summer before my senior year, I had an opportunity to travel to England with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Not only did I get to see amazing things like Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross Station…

Hogwarts bound!

And tour London…

My classmates and I before attending Sunday
service at Westminster Abbey.

But I also saw a lot of quilts. UNL sent us to England as part of a depth reporting project on the international scope of quilts and quiltmaking. We were working on a magazine and documentary to be released in conjunction with the grand opening of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at Quilt House in spring 2008.

We went to England, because there were excellent sources for us to interview at the Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum in London. We were also fortunate enough to meet with Bridget Long, an IQSCM associate fellow, and one of her friends in Ashwell, near Cambridge.

The main elements of our research took place at the International Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. While our friends at the IQSCM, who are now my colleagues, told us the festival would be bigger than we could imagine, I wasn't prepared for the frenzy of activity that would meet us. We saw hundreds of quilts, including a mixture of historical, contemporary, and art quilts. And we also met wonderful people, both in our interviews and by mingling in the crowd.

Though this British quilt looks different than any of the pieces I saw during that trip in 2007, it reminds me of the festival and of one of the greatest experiences in my life.

Black and Blue

Editor's Note: To celebrate the upcoming grand opening of the newly expanded Quilt House gallery, International Quilt Study Center & Museum team members are blogging about pieces in the gallery's inaugural exhibition, "Getting to Know You."

Checkerboard, maker unknown, made in United States,
circa 1800-1820. IQSCM 1997.007.0376

By Carolyn Ducey
Curator of Collections

This quilt calls to my heart. There is something so dramatic about the blue and black squares on point that I love. Rich, dark, pulsing… But then, you notice the candy cane outer border. The turquoise blue is just the right shade lighter than the center blue, so it adds a flash of color. The pale pink, in parallelograms that point upward, literally pushes your eye back to the quilt – a remarkably effective design element. Then, when you think you’ve seen it all, look – the maker brought the three border colors used together in the bottom center. Aaaaah, it just literally makes my eyes happy.

And, if you are lucky enough to have worked with this quilt, you know that is it composed of wool, some loosely woven but fused to create a luscious shine. The light plays with the designs the quilter used to join the layers… carefully crafted floral patterns.

I want to hug this quilt  – even though it is a bit stiff and scratchy. I want to wrap myself in this particular woman’s vision and just feel her creative  spirit for a moment. Wow.

Game Boards, Old and New

Editor's Note: To celebrate the upcoming grand opening of the newly expanded Quilt House gallery, International Quilt Study Center & Museum team members are blogging about pieces in the gallery's inaugural exhibition, "Getting to Know You."

Kantha, maker unknown, made in Bangladesh,
circa 1900-1925. IQSCM 2012.001.0004.

By Marin Hanson
Curator of Exhibitions

For many reasons, this kantha piqued my interest as soon as I saw it. I love the Hindu gods Krishna and Radha in the center; I can never resist an elephant; and the British cavalry soldier clearly references India's colonial past (and I was a history major, after all). But obviously, the snakes are the showstoppers here. Every time I look at them, they remind me of board games – Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, even Life. Those were the games I liked as a child, the ones where you seemed to be going on an adventure – linear, yes, but definitely twisty and turny.

So I started poking around online and found out that Chutes and Ladders, a Milton Bradley board game first released in 1943, was simply a version of an old Indian game called Snakes and Ladders. In the game, you roll a die to move through the numbered squares on the grid; if you land on a square with a ladder, you ascend one or more rows, but if you land on a snake, you descend, sometimes all the way back to the beginning.

Snakes and Ladders, India, 19th century

Chutes and Ladders, c. 1952. ("Cnl03" by DASHbot.
Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia)

In the Indian game, Hindu ideas of morality were abundant: "The ladders represented virtues such as generosity, faith, and humility, while the snakes represented vices such as lust, anger, murder, and theft. The morality lesson of the game was that a person can attain salvation (Moksha) through doing good, whereas by doing evil one will inherit rebirth to lower forms of life. The number of ladders was less than the number of snakes as a reminder that a path of good is much more difficult to tread than a path of sins" (Wikipedia). In the Western version, much of this morality is absent, but the fun of seeing who can make it to the top first is still there.

I now want to figure out if I could turn this kantha into a board game of some kind. How would you do it?