The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt
Laurie Aaron Hird, author of The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt (Cincinnati, Ohio: Krause Publications, 2009) created a quilt inspired by contest letters in January 1922 to The Farmer’s Wife: A Magazine for Farm Women. Women were asked to respond as to whether or not they would want their daughter to marry a farmer. The consensus was in the affirmative.
In this new book, Laurie offers up a dose of farm wife sentiments via reprinted letters from that contest. She has included photos of quilt blocks throughout the book, and on a separate CD, she provides templates that can be printed out, one to a page.
The book features clear diagrams that demonstrate how blocks can be put together, one block per page, with a colorful thumbnail view of the block in the upper left hand corner.
The letters are charming and are truly a piece of United States History. The blocks utilize reproduction fabrics from the 19th century and that may confuse a few people if they expected the hues to coincide with 1920s colors. If we use our imaginations, we might think of this quilt as one that used left-over scraps from the former century. Laurie hand-pieced the entire quilt, but “farmed it out” to be longarm machine-quilted.
Some of the letters writers had strong opinions. One woman from Cheshire County, New Hampshire ended her letter with:
When someone offers my daughter love, marriage and a home, I would much rather it would be a clear-eyed, clean-hearted, penniless farmer than a city man with a white-collar position and a large salary.
This book is worth collecting, if only to read the letters from farm women and see all of the 111 quilt blocks they inspired. If one is ambitious, one can choose from different sizes of quilts to re-create Hird’s vision and make a quilt of their own. The Bonus CD offers 106 templates for piecing. It is abundantly clear that this book was a lot of work to create!
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
