Dresden Star

Maree St Clair bought this quilt from Cindy Rennels, an antique dealer in America. While its provenance is sketchy, it’s believed to be an original quilt made in the 1930s in Ohio. The quilt contains a wide variety of 1930s fabrics and lots of feedsacks. Maree has recreated this quilt with reproduction 1930s prints and plain-coloured quilter’s muslin.

Quilts from the 1930s are some of the most sought-after by quilt collectors. Many of the original backgrounds are simple quilter’s muslin; bright pinks, blues, yellows and reds were also common background colours. The prints were an array of small and large florals, geometrics, polka dots, plaids, stripes and novelty prints — a happy collection of colours and prints.

Almost all quilts from this era were . It was common for a group of friends to get together and do the quilting and this became known as a . Some paid others to hand-quilt for them that it took for the quilting rather than the number of hours the quilting actually took.