New England Quilt Museum

I went up to Lowell on Friday to the New England Quilt Museum for their quilt documentation day to document two family quilts, both believed to have been made by Imogene (Everson) McClellan in the late 1800s. The process was very interesting to observe, a team of volunteers worked with me to document the oral history about the quilt (which I had brought with me, a sketch about Imogene as well as a genealogy and the provenance of the quilt) and then they photographed each quilt and identified technical aspects of the quilts. The Chinoiserie blue and brown quilt they thought was perhaps mid-1800s instead of late 1800s as we had supposed. Additionally, they discovered a small cross-stitched "D", leading to an educated guess that the quilt was made by Imogene's mother, Deborah (Bates) Everson. They thought the Asian quilt was beautiful, and loved small details like the fact that she used blue thread for the blue fabric and brown thread for the brown pieces, and arranged the patterns with little men to face opposite directions to correspond with how the quilt would drape on a bed. The green childrens quilt they all agreed was well-loved, and noted that the white fabric was actually originally yellow, and that the main batting for the quilt was actually a thin wool blanket.