Border to Border: Historic Quilts and Quiltmakers of
Montana
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There is the Lily quilt, made around 1852 by Lydia Knox and her
daughter Emeline Knox Morrison that warmed Emeline and her husband
on their 1913 homestead in Big Sandy, where "their main source of
meat was jack-rabbit or cottontail." There is the Civil War quilt
made for the U.S. Sanitary Commission that sparked romance and later
marriage between Captain Robert Emmett Fisk and Lizzie Chester and
inspired, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, a quilt project
for families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is
the green-and-white Bull Durham Patchwork quilt that Mary Kent
Stevens made by bleaching, dying, and reusing the muslin, thread,
and string from tobacco bags. There are the two pictorial quilts
made during the Great Depression with pictures drawn by James
Garfield, an Assiniboine, and embroidered by his wife, Nora
Garfield, a Hunkpapa Sioux, that feature thirty-two blocks detailing
daily Assiniboine life and culture. |
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Border to Border presents the history behind these quilts,
beginning with territorial period of the 1860s and running through
the early twenty-first century. As the reader studies the quilt
patterns, the stitching, the colors, and the quiltmakers' detailed
histories, what emerges in Border to Border is, as historian
Mary Murphy writes, "the vivid, palpable evidence of the work of
thousands of Montana women." |
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