Laura Wheeler’s “Friendship Garden”

Travel back to January 12, 1940.

The Baltimore News-Post published an ad for a Laura Wheeler Design known as Friendship Garden. The advertisement reads: In this scrap quilt, Friendship Garden, you can combine varied materials to your heart’s content. Pattern 2451 contains accurate pattern pieces; diagram of block; yardages; instructions; diagram of quilt. The price? Ten cents in coin.

Mrs. Mary L. Murrell, a professional seamstress living in Baltimore, purchased the Friendship Garden pattern in the winter of 1940. She chose to make her Friendship Garden with dressmaker scraps that she owned. Using silks, satins, and crepe fabrics, Mrs. Murrell made more than 30 blocks but never completed her project.

Reading through the instructions provided for Friendship Garden (Pattern 2451), it was apparent that this design was actually a lined quilt top and not an actual quilt. The instructions required an interlining and the pattern recommended sheet cotton. There is no reference to batting or quilting in the instructions.

The instructions state:

Line the quilt, sewing the edge of the lining to the border seam.

Tack the lining to the quilt by tacking each block down at the corners as invisibly as possible, also tacking at the edges of patches at intervals throughout the quilt.

Sharing Quilt History  Do you own old patterns, vintage newspaper clippings, or vintage quilt kits? These items can be documented through a Quilt History Documentation Project from the Center For The Quilt organization. The project inventories quilt-related ephemera or kits in a project called Boxes Under The Bed.

The website location for their inventory form is: http://www.centerforthequilt.org/boxes/boxes.html

This project is one of the quilt-related projects managed by The Alliance for American Quilts. Their website is:  http://www.quiltalliance.org/index1.html  

If you ( or anyone you know) has vintage newspaper clippings or old patterns, consider sharing the information through the Boxes Under The Bed documentation project. The information you provide will be contributed to The International Quilt Index, an online database of patchwork patterns. Be sure to check out this Index here:

http://www.centerforthequilt.org/quiltindex.html