Ontario S Heritage Quilts

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.

The story of the American Quilt Trail, featuring the colorful patterns of quilt squares painted large on barns throughout North America, is the story of one of the fastest-growing grassroots public arts movements in the United States and Canada. In Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement Suzi Parron takes us to twenty-five states as well as Canada to visit the people and places that have put this movement on America’s tourist and folk art map. Through dozens of interviews with barn quilt artists, committee members, and barn owners, Parron documents a journey that began in 2001 with the founder of the movement, Donna Sue Groves. Groves’s desire to honor her mother with a quilt square painted on their barn became a group effort that eventually grew into a county-wide project. Today, quilt squares form a long imaginary clothesline, appearing on more than three thousand barns scattered along one hundred and twenty driving trails. With more than eighty full-color photographs, Parron documents here a movement that combines rural economic development with an American folk art phenomenon.

New tools and techniques have brought new life to the traditional craft of quilting. This has revived interest in the many attractive designs which are part of Canada's cultural heritage. Authors Karen Neary and Diane Shink are both knowledgeable quilters with a special interest in the quilting history of Canada's Maritime provinces. They are also experts in the new techniques which make quilting a more enjoyable and less time-consuming activity. In this book, they provide the patterns and instructions which allow quilters to sew many attractive heritage quilts -- and explain how to create innovative variants on traditional patterns. Among the distinctly Canadian quilts featured in the book are the Maple Leaf Signature Quilt and the Log Cabin Quilt. Uniquely Maritime quilt patterns included in this collection are the Mariner's Compass Tote Bag or Postcards from the Maritimes Applique Quilt. Other patterns included are the exotic French Silk Quilt, the Velvet Rail Fence Lap Quilt, Gram's Baptist Fans and the Little Red Hen Quilt. Patterns include suggested colour schemes and fabrics, an introductory history about the quilt type, templates and detailed, tested directions.

For close to two hundred years, families and individuals across Ontario have travelled down country roads and gathered to enjoy seasonal agricultural fairs. Though some features of township and county fairs have endured for generations, these community events have also undergone significant transformations since 1850, especially in terms of women’s participation. Cultivating Community tells the story of how women’s involvement became critical to agricultural fairs’ growth and prosperity. By examining women’s diverse roles as agricultural society members, fair exhibitors, performers, volunteers, and fairgoers, Jodey Nurse shows that women used fairs’ manifold nature to present different versions of rural womanhood. Although traditional domestic skills and handicrafts, such as baking, needlework, and flower arrangement, remained the domain of women throughout this period, women steadily enlarged their sphere of influence on the fairgrounds. By the mid-twentieth century they had staked out a place in venues previously closed to them, including the livestock show ring, the athletic field, and the boardroom. Through a wealth of fascinating stories and colourful detail, Cultivating Communities adds a new dimension to the social and cultural history of rural women, placing their activities at the centre of the agricultural fair.

Design and Heritage provides the first extended study of heritage from the point of view of design history. Exploring the material objects and spaces that contribute to our experience of heritage, the volume also examines the processes and practices that shape them. Bringing together 18 case studies, written by authors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Norway, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the book questions how design functions to produce heritage. Including provocative case studies of objects that reinterpret visual symbols of cultural identity and buildings and monuments that evoke feelings of national pride and historical memory, as well as landscapes embedded with trauma, contributors consider how we can work to develop adequate shared conceptual models of heritage and apply them to design and its histories. Exploring the distinction between tangible and intangible heritages, the chapters consider what these categories mean for design history and heritage. Finally, the book questions whether it might be possible to promote a truly equitable understanding of heritage that illuminates the social, cultural and economic roles of design. Design and Heritage demonstrates that design historical methods of inquiry contribute significantly to critical heritage studies. Academics, researchers and students engaged in the study of heritage, design history, material culture, folklore, art history, architectural history and social and cultural history will find much to interest them within the pages of the book.