The Streamline Quilt

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Quilt offered at Skinner Auctions in 2012

Quilt #4

When Merikay Waldvogel and I were researching quilts from the 1933 Sears contest at the Chicago World's Fair we came across this pattern in a quilt. We assumed it was an entry in the contest that promised a bonus award for a first prize winner in the theme of a Century of Progress. See a post about the contest quilts on December 5, 2013 here:

http://historicallymodernquilts.blogspot.com/2013/12/vintage-art-deco-quilts.html

The first example we saw was at a quilt show in Chicago in 1982. The owner had found it stuffed under the cushions in an old couch. [ I can't find the slide of that quilt.]

Quilt #2

We also have a snapshot of this quilt on display made  by a woman named Inez Gregg.

The story became more complex when we found a similar example at a Michael DeFina auction in Ohio in 1986.

Quilt #3

This is on it's side. The white parachutes should go up.

Quilt #3

That quilt is probably the same quilt as one pictured in the Quilt Engagement Calendar in 1988.

To identify the differences look at the waves in the lower half. Some alternate dark and light;

one quilt has all the dark wiggly lines at the top of the water.

The mystery of the similar quilts was solved ten years later when pattern collector Wilene Smith wrote us that a kit for the quilt was sold by Country Gentleman magazine in 1937.

The August issue of their section Country Gentlewoman featured section with a color picture of the pattern (it loooks like a painting rather than an actual quilt. 

Under the headline "New-Time Quilting Goes Streamline," Editor Caroline B. King wrote that they had "asked Miss Inez Kemery, a gifted young mural painter to [design a quilt inspired by] inventions and events which have made this present age so wonderful." (My photocopy of the article is missing a few words.) The quilt was "modern to the last stitch." One could purchase pattern E 11178 which ”includes material required and directions for making the Streamline Quilt."

Kits---in plain colors. That explains the similarity.

Quilt #4 again.

This one is different from #2 and #3.

With this one offered by Skinner last year we have four quilts and one painting---

Two Inezes with no apparent link between them.

And one idea for a very moderne quilt.