The Quilt Index is a joint project of Michigan State University Museum and the Alliance for American Quilts and is one of my favorite sites in all of the internet. (If Dr. Spock was a quilter he would hang out here....) So here is a site I love as much as butter cookies (and that my friends is saying something!) that they have relaunched with some even cooler additions.
The now have nearly 50,000 search-able quilt records from more than 29 contributors. What does this mean. Say you find an interesting Irish Chain quilt like mine in the photo above in your Grandmothers attic and wonder if there are others like it. You just type "Irish Chain" into the seach box at www.quiltindex.org and just see how many photos you get to look through! If you go to the basic display page you can even play with the zoom feature that lets you focus on specific parts of the quilt. (This is a great feature for the applique and sampler quilts!) The history pages for the quilts can be really interesting reads too.)
They just completed a new project on Signature quilts (the Signature Quilt Project.) This project allowed for public submissions to the listing in a narrow field. I forwarded this to the folks in that own the really fun signature quilt that I saw in October. There were several similar to it in the Index along with information on how to research these quilts.
This quilt is one of my favorites in the signature study. It is the Quaker signature quilt and combines piecing, applique and signatures. (the little applique signature block at the top of this post is from my collection...one I mean to research soon....)So my plan for today - make up a batch of cookies and a pot of tea, then change into my most comfortable jammies and spend this rainy day playing in the new quilt index...do I know how to have a good time or what!
