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• 1 2024-05-06T06:36:57-07:00 Sulphur Springs Quilting Bee - Crazy Quilt 20 Broadside Television plain 1519728 2024-06-17T12:23:32-07:00 The following video is one of more than 600 recordings from the Broadside Television T.V. Collection at the Archives of Appalachia.  Through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tennessee Arts Commission, and private sources, Broadside produced a variety of programs on life in southern and central Appalachia in the 1970s.  Among the topics examined by Broadside were coal mining, energy and environmental needs and problems, land use, traditional arts, handicrafts, music, education, storytelling, aging and the needs of senior citizens, and regional history.
  
  This footage of a quilting bee in Sulphur Springs, begins with a group of women sitting around a wooden quilting frame, on which the top, lining, and backing of a quilt has been prepared for quilting.   The women discuss the major steps in making a quilt, and also talk about family quilts.  The camera pans around the table with close-ups of the hands of the women adding stitching to the quilt.  Lively conversation is exchanged between the women as they add stitches. 
  
  
  Sulphur Springs Quilt-Making (part one), Broadside Television (T.V.) Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University
  
  At section 3.26, one of the women demonstrates and describes a Crazy Quilt. 
  
  The interviewer asks, “What kind of quilt do you call that?” 
  
  A woman says, “Crazy Quilt.”
  
  As the camera focuses on the quilt, showing the various patterns within a square, and the various types of quilting stitches, the woman explains, “This is a Crazy Quilt pieced in blocks.  You see some of them they cut a square, maybe twelve squares together and no two squares are the same, they use different pieces.” 
  
  In looking at another quilt, the woman proceeds to tell him that this particular quilt is 75 years old. 
  
  He asks her “who made it?”
  
  She answers, “I don’t know if my grandmother Deakins or if my mother made it.”
  
  In looking at another quilt the interviewer asks, “What do you call that pattern?”
  
  She answers, “Bear’s Claw.”
  
  Another lady tells him the Crazy Quilt is around 150 years old.”
  
  The camera focuses on a third quilt.
  
  Interviewer:       This is the Friendship Quilt?
  
  Woman:               Yes.
  
  Interviewer:       It was made when?
  
  Woman:               1934.  She continued, “I asked you for a nickel, and when you gave me a nickel, then your name went on the quilt.  My father bought it.  I’ve forgotten how much he paid for it.  I did know, but then he…here it is.  The Ladies of Sulphur Springs Methodist Church made in in 19 and 34.  That was a way to support the church, maybe for missions or a project for the church.  They would sell names.  We quilted, we used to meet about once a week, a group of ladies, and quilt.  Then we’d sell the quilts.”
  
  Interviewer:       And this was all for church work.
  
  Woman:               Mmhmmm.  The more names they would get on there, the more money they would make, selling for five or ten cents a name.  Then they’d embroider the name on there and auction it off when the got the quilt completed. 
  
  Another woman proceeds to show the interviewer a quilt with a feather stitch.  She shows him a flower and a butterfly on the quilt. “It is cotton, and they had to quilt it real close to keep it from knotting up.  See how close it is down here.  This is about 90 years old.”
  They proceed to look at two more quilts, but do not know the name of the quilt.   One woman says it is possibly the Ocean Wave quilt.  “It is a real old pattern.”
  
  Another woman tells him the quilt is 75 years old, but she is not sure if a grandmother or great-grandmother quilted it.  She said this quilt has cotton seed in it. 
  
  A woman explained that when they carded the cotton, they laid it on little cards instead of rolls like now.  “It was in a little batch.  They missed a cotton seed every once in a while, and that’s how you can tell it’s an old quilt, by the cotton seed.
  
  Interviewer:  I didn’t know people in this area raised cotton.
  
  Woman:  They did, it was hard too, but they raised enough for quilts.