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WATCH: Every square tells a story: Edmonton expert is exploring Red Deer’s quilting history

Community members can bring in family heirloom quilts for documentation

The social histories of many Central Alberta women, their fashions, fabrics — and sometimes, even their ceremonial occasions — have been stitched into quilt squares.

This wealth of homemade heritage is bringing an expert from the Royal Alberta Museum to Red Deer Oct. 25 and 26 to examine and document quilts from this part of the province.

Lucie Heins, the Edmonton museum’s assistant curator, will first take a close look at the quilts in the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery collection.

They include such singular examples as a quilt made entirely of fabric eyeglass cleaning squares.

Mabel Snell, a local optometrist’s wife, had collected these small squares of fabric, stamped with optometrists’ addresses.

“They were included with every new set of glasses, and available in these pastel colours: pinks and yellows and greens,” said Kim Verrier, exhibitions co-ordinator at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery.

Sometime during the 1930s, when everything was being recycled, Snell decided to make a whole quilt of them.

Verrier believes a lot of information about the social history of women from decades past can be found in quilts. The time-consuming projects were often made for weddings, births or christenings, and were stitched from fabrics that were current to the era— sometimes from recycled dresses and shirts, or even flour sacking.

Patterns range from random scraps for crazy quilts to intricate rosettes and elaborate eight-pointed stars.

Verrier said Mrs. Robert Martin Younge, whose son-in-law ran the Alberta Ladies College in Red Deer, created a striking red-and-white quilt in an old pattern called “robbing Peter to pay Paul” in 1913. It’s also in the museum collection.

Since most history books written about Canadian quilts are about quilts in Eastern Canada, Heins intends to add to the catalogue from Western Canada with her project.

After documenting museum quilts, Heins will open up The Alberta Quilt Project to community members who want to show her their grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s quilts.

Area residents who own a made-in-Alberta quilt crafted before 1970, or one that was brought here by immigrants, can register for an appointment by calling the museum. Heins will be documenting and photographing these family heirlooms on Oct. 26.

She plans to look at the techniques and materials used to make the quilt, as well as the story around the quilt and quilt maker.

The Western Canadian History Program at the Royal Alberta Museum has been working on an Alberta Craft Research Initiative to document the material culture of craft production within Alberta. The Alberta Quilt Project is a component of this initiative.



lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com

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