300 Years Of Canada S Quilts

Quiltmaking has long been associated with the culture of tiny Prince Edward Island on Canada's east coast. Nearly twenty years ago, Sherrie Davidson launched her Heirloom Quilt Survey, dedicated to preserving the history of quiltmaking on Prince Edward Island. Quilts of Prince Edward Island-The Fabric of Rural Life presents the results of Davidson's work in a lushly illustrated, scrapbook-style volume, complete with excerpts from diaries and news stories, and discussion of the patterns and techniques that have been passed down through families. Full-colour photographs throughout, and chapters on early settlement, the Acadian/Cajun quilting community, and extended visits to some of the Island's best-known contemporary quiltmakers, make this an engaging look at rural life and craft alike.

When Catharine Parr Traill came to Upper Canada in 1832 as a settler from England, she brought along with her ties to British botanical culture. Nonetheless, when she arrived she encountered a new natural landscape and, like other women chronicled in this book, set out to advance the botanical knowledge of the time from the Canadian field. Flora’s Fieldworkers employs biography, botanical data, herbaria specimens, archival sources, letters, institutional records, book history, and abundant artwork to reconstruct the ways in which women studied and understood plants in the nineteenth century. It features figures ranging from elite women involved in imperial botanical projects in British North America to settler-colonial women in Ontario and Australia – most of whom were scarcely visible in the historical record – who were active in “plant work” as collectors, writers, artists, craft workers, teachers, and organizers. Understood as an appropriate pastime for genteel ladies, botany offered women pathways to scientific education, financial autonomy, and self-expression. The call for more diverse voices in the present must look to the past as well. Bringing botany to historians and historians to botany, Flora’s Fieldworkers gathers compelling material about women in colonial and imperial Canada and Australia to take a new look at how we came to know what we know about plants.

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life.

Relying heavily upon oral tradition, the book embraces the diverse disciplines of folklore, history, language, geography, literature, sociology, agriculture, botany, and home economics. It covers emigration history, community and domestic lifestyles, religious and social structure (including songs, poems, legends, and folktales), customs and beliefs, and material culture. Discussions are supported throughout by testimonies of many Townshippers, quoted verbatim, enabling the "voice" of the Gael to continue to be heard. Oatmeal and the Catechism will be of great interest to scholars and students of Gaelic studies and folklore in addition to Quebecers and others whose Scottish ancestors settled in Quebec and eastern Canada and helped carve a country out of the wilderness.

A well illustration celebration of the quilt: Textile historian and fabric artist Marilyn Walker examines the patterns, fabrics and techniques used by Ontario's quilters through a fascinating discussion of individual quilts and their makers.

One hundred spectacular antique quilts from one of the largest, privately held quilt and textile collections in the world. Turn back time with color photos and insightful essays about America’s quilting past! Admire one hundred antique quilts and textiles you’ve never seen before, curated from the remarkable Poos Collection. Flip through the pages to find a wide range of styles in pre-Civil War quilting—elaborate hand piecing and appliqué, signature quilts, wholecloth beauties, cutout chintz, and intarsia, plus the only known example of an American pictorial war quilt. An invaluable resource to America’s quilt history, the Poos Collection shares its classic, one-of-a-kind quilts. Admire one hundred colorful artifacts from the priceless Poos Collection Read insights and information on the history behind the quilts Relax and feast your eyes on these pre-1860 quilts, including album, wool, paper-pieced, white-on-white wholecloth, red and green, indigo, and chintz quilts