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Quilt Notes: The quilt design called MEMORY is featured in QUILTS! QUILTS!! QUILTS!!! by Diana McClure and Laura Nownes, with 5 distinctly different color combinations, suggested by 5 contemporary quilters. But one thing all the combinations have in common is that they share a certain "vividness" of color, which does seem appropriate to the name.
MEMORY is similar to the WYOMING VALLEY BLOCK (which includes a center diamond, see Nancy Cabot's 1936 version left) and to AMISH STAR. It is included in Barbara Brackman's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PIECED QUILT PATTERNS (#1772), where it is dated back to Clara Stone's PRACTICAL NEEDLEWORK QUILT PATTERNS, 1906. See also Jinny Beyer's QUILTER'S ALBUM OF PATCHWORK PATTERNS p. 136-4.
Quits are traditionally made to commemorate all sorts of connections with friends and relatives or special events — Emily Dickinson seems to include her garden flowers, returning each year, as among her remembered acquaintances. The following poem was sent in a note to a neighbor along with a tulip from her garden, and it includes that same vividness, so consistent in the QUILTS! QUILTS! QUILTS! collection:
"SHE slept beneath a tree
Remembered but by me.
I touched her cradle mute;
She recognized the foot,
Put on her carmine suit, —
And see!"
(With a Tulip.)
~ Emily Dickinson
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MEMORY / WYOMING VALLEY
