At the Cottonwood Ranch Historic Site.

One of the featured artifacts is a quilt bearing the names of several women who lived near the neighboring town of Studley in the 1930s.

But displays of quilts at this or other sites and museums are more than examples of historic bed coverings.

They share the story of the skill and resilience of women building community in the settlement of the Plains.

But this particular quilt is at the Cottonwood Ranch, and it was made by the G&G Club.

The G&G Club.

Stood for gab and giggle.

These are people that lived basically in a half mile of here, this G&G club, and they would get together and have a good time.

The club meetings usually lasted all day or from mid-morning until at least mid-afternoon.

Being a native out here, I knew of a lot of sewing clubs that my grandmother's or my aunts or even my mother were in different clubs.

But they would help people do quilts, embroider tea towels, embroider pillowcases.

And some of these were for a certain person you might have maybe somebody getting married in the area.

And so the sewing club would do a quilt.

These women would get together.

They would go to someone's house.

Usually you always shared food.

You always broke bread with people.

And then they had the social thing, too.

But this social thing was you're actually getting together and you had an excuse, you know, like if the husband was saying, Why are you going there?

You don't do anything.

You can do that at home.

Well, no, we're going to help Anne out.

We're going to do some sewing for Anne.

And so that was kind of the gell that would get them together.

They were actually serving a purpose.

And also satisfying some of their own social needs.

The importance of women's social groups is recognized in various sites and museums, including the Nicodemus National Historic Site, with a description of the Priscilla Arts Club.

The women of Nicodemus were quite active socially and politically, and the Priscilla Arts Club, I think is representative of the act... of the idea that they would get together and do these kinds of craft projects or quilting projects or projects that they did for people in the community.

They were really a support organization in and of itself.

African-American women that settled here at Nicodemus.

These women brought with them a lot of skills that they had acquired during slavery, and so they became really some of the most sought after women in terms of work.

And they organized themselves into clubs and associations.

They also, you know, brought their quilting and they did a lot of their quilting and a lot of the quilts that they made, they donated to the needy people in the community.

Sometimes they used them as fundraisers.

Sometimes they just helped each other out making their quilts so that they could be used in their own homes.

My mother was a quilter.

I mean, she quilted her entire life.

I don't remember her ever not having a quilt that she was working on.

And right before she died at the age of 77 in 2004.

She had just finished the the last quilts of her great grandchildren.

So all of her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren that were alive at the time got a quilt from her.

But when my mother taught me to quilt, it was a very special time because she was always sewing and she got she had a little Singer.

Featherweights I think that's what they were called.

So I learned to sew and quilt on that little Featherweight.

Well, after I graduated from high school and she gave me my high school quilt, which I still have today.

And it's very, very heavy.

And there's nothing like a homemade heavy quilt.

Yeah, but my mother... sitting with my mother and learning the craft of embroidery and making sure that the stitches were small and that they were consistent, you know, and the back of the piece should look as neat as the front of the piece, you know, those being the standards passed on to to me.

And those are the kinds of little things that I think make a difference in the terms in terms of the way that things look like.

I can tell you that all of the pieces here in this quilt piece that it is it is old.

It was never finished, by Ola Wilson, the stitching on the back is real tiny and this is hand-stitched and it's beautiful.

And these little blocks are all the same size.

The passing along of such skills was a vital part of life in the settlement era.

Marla Day, curator of the Historic Costume and Textile Museum at Kansas State University, shared some of the methods for teaching the craft.

One of the projects that they were often tasked with doing as a young girl learning to sew is a needlework sampler.

This particular one is earlier, dates to 1780, but it has such a charming story.

The young girl that made it got cross one day with her mother and chose to cut the sampler in half, but her mother stopped her before she cut it completely through.

But the girl was hoping that it would be the end of her troubles, and maybe she wouldn't have to finish.

And her mother said, Not so.

This is a a sewing primer book for young girls, and it's dated to 1886.

Preparation for sewing, the work basket, and then all about the tools and techniques about learning how to sew.

But included in the book are songs that might have helped keep everybody motivated, because learning to sew is not an easy thing.

Try.

Oh, try.

That'll keep them going for a while.

And then this is a recent gift to our museum, and this is a sampler dated 1893, and it contains crochet samples that were done so they can be referenced to go back and remember and refresh your mind.

Kansas State Agricultural College really began their women's courses in 1873.

One of them was just sewing and learning how to repair garments and so or construct.

They learned some pattern making.

They would usually start by making a book of samples.

This is the earliest example of one of our students workbooks that we have.

She graduated from Kansas State Agricultural College in 1896.

This is over casting a seam.

And what's great about this one, she used a darker thread so you can actually see all of the stitches and then they were graded on those examples.

So all of this work was done by hand, and this one is a felled theme.

So on the back side it has no seam... raw seam showing.

So that particular seam technique is very tedious to do, especially by hand.

And then there's how to to patch or to dawn, which is always a real fun one to see.

This is the striped fabric and there's actually a patch in there, very hard to see.

So I'll flip it over.

From the back side you can see where the seam allowances are and how well she's matched it up so that you can't even see where it is.

So, beautiful execution there.

The bodice was made by one of our faculty members.

It's entirely made by hand and dates to about 1880.

If you can imagine, all the buttonholes are worked by hand.

There were sewing machines, but this one is entirely made by hand.

Beautifully executed.

This is another piece that Maud Gardner did.

The person that did the book.

It was for part of the completion for her masters studies at Kansas State Agricultural College.

It is a half scale replica, fully tailored.

Now, it's not doll clothes.

And we do this with our students today, but working half scale from an idea, a concept, you can drape it onto this half scale form to sort of see if you've got the proportions right.

But what's cool about Maud, she graduated from here and she went on to start the women's program at Oklahoma State University.

And she went there before Oklahoma was even a state.

And Oklahoma State still honors her today.

And there's the Gardner Gallery on the Oklahoma State campus.

And I brought in an example of a crazy quilt.

Now, crazy quilts were a trend that started in the late 1880s and continued through the 1890s.

But what it did was combine pieces from your scrap basket.

But along the edges, you would embellish it with your needle arts.

So they're always full of all kinds of embroidery, stitches and embellishments.

Following the thread of quilting, we visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas.

I'm Jenny Tracz and I'm the assistant director here at the Prairie Museum of Art and History.

And I am also a costume and textile conservator.

And I have pulled some quilts out of our collection today.

This is one of my favorite types of quilts.

And this is called a crazy quilt.

And as you can see, it is quite crazy.

There is actually a method to the madness, however.

They are actually sewn in square blocks.

And these were very small scraps saved.

They would save even the smallest scrap to piece together in a creative geometric design.

This here is quite possibly a wedding gown.

Ties were a really great source of silks.

And then they did all sorts of appliqué stitching over the top to highlight their stitching skills and to create further delineations between types of fabric that may otherwise have blended together in conservation work I do a lot of conservation on crazy quilts because they are just so fun and they're often big family treasures.

This quilt is an appliqué quilt and is called the Ohio Rose.

They took great care to hand stitch the appliqués onto the back, the base pattern and it is also hand quilted at around 7 to 8 stitches per inch.

If you can see, the back is often as intricate as the front.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the pattern of the design of the actual quilting stitches until you turn it over and look at the back, which is really gorgeous.

Friendship quilts became quite popular.

And often this was the only time you got to see a woman's first name written down.

A lot of times they would go by Mrs. Moe Linden would be how they would sign their checks, how they were addressed in public, and how they were addressed if they had any print newspaper items written about them.

This is an exciting example because it actually has examples of both ways that women wrote their names.

So we do have a Mrs. A, but we also have first names written as well.

These are just really great documentations of an era that we don't have a lot of documentation on women's work.

Good morning.

I'm Karen Lewis.

I'm the director at the Sheridan County Historical Society and Mickey's Museum of Hoxie.

They got together, they made these quilts and they had their names on them.

But now we use them also as another tool.

We here at the Historical Society, we use that for our own benefit to maybe find somebody that we didn't know was on a quilt.

We didn't know even that they lived here until we found their name on a quilt, and then we can trace them back to a census record, maybe unfold the history of that person that way.

This quilt here has school kids.

This quilt back here has a church lady group.

This quilt was made for a teacher in 1953 and she was retiring from one room schools.

It has many names on it.

The quilt itself is a cross referencing tool, so I can use it many different ways to find lots of different people.

This quilt was made at the Seguin Catholic Church.

This quilt actually has a date on it, so we know it was 1935 when these quilt blocks were made.

The special story about this quilt is that we actually had a picture that we put on our Facebook page, and it was these three children, and we had no idea who they were.

And the family contacted us and said, Hey, this is who they are, and they're Isabel, Elizabeth and Raymond Schuetz And then here they are on the quilt also.

So it helps.

You know, they were here at that time.

A very good cross-reference.

This quilt, it's a quilt made for the 1940 class.

And so you can find all the names.

It tells me also that they were maybe a fairly close class, because they wanted to memorialize themselves together still.

This quilt has special meaning because it was a time just before World War Two.

Several of these men and women served in our armed forces during World War Two.

When we are able to find a connection to someone that has come into the museum, it is so thrilling to be able to help them piece their family history together.

Even if you're looking for clues that you might not be knowing what you're looking for.

So this quilt was is actually from my own collection.

We only can pinpoint from 1928 to 1939 because it has Mrs. Beck's name on here.

Her husband was a minister at the time, so we can get it narrowed down.

But it was in my parents things and my sister and I had never seen it before even.

And so we had to take it to some elders from the church.

It has Mrs. Michaels Schlicher.

They didn't have the first names here.

They only had the husband's name.

So it's Mrs. M H Schlicher, Mrs. William Stillman.

Since this is in my collection, it has been invaluable for me to piece these people together.

Because actually, Mrs. William Stillman was my great aunt and some of the other people on here were my great ancestors also.

So their it pulled me into some of my own family.

Actually, we believe this was made for my grandparents' wedding because they were married about that time... in that time frame.

As a costume and textile conservator, I get asked a lot about how to store family heirloom quilts.

Many of us have them.

You can never fully stop degradation, but you can slow it down by changing the storage environment that it's in.

I do encourage all you folks out there that store your quilts in your wonderful family heirloom cedar chest to go ahead and remove those from that cedar chest.

Wood off gases and it's very detrimental.

So here I have an acid free box.

You can buy these at museum supply stores online.

And here we have acid free tissue paper.

Another option that I do like to put out there, which is a lot more convenient for folks, is sheets.

A lot of you can buy sheets.

You have lots of them laying around, but they're really great to grab at estate sales, give them a good wash in some really hot water with a neutral detergent.

No fabric softener used.

They make great storage housing for your quilts.

So this is approximately our one third mark, and we're just going to fold that over and we're going to stuff and pad our fold.

And this, as you can tell, creates a nice cushion and a nice padding for your fold.

Okay.

I'm going to use the tissue paper to stuff the rest of my folds.

I'm going to lay this over here and then estimate where my fold is going to be.

Again, a third.

Now I have two precut sheets here.

We're going to do the same thing in this direction too.

We're going to fold in thirds.

Your tissue paper will crush over time.

So it's a good idea to pull these out periodically and check your tissue paper.

You might want to take your sheets out occasionally and wash them, and then I'm going to fold this one up.

And as you can see, I've also lined my acid free box with acid free tissue paper, and you can put multiple quilts in the same box, just kind of depends on the size of your storage space and the size of your quilt and how it folds up.

As you can see, my quilt doesn't have very many folds.

You always want to try to smooth out any wrinkles as best as you can, and then after you get your quilt placed in your box, you want to go ahead and cover it with one final layer of tissue paper or sheet.

And now you're ready to store this.

And it should be ready to take out and preserve for future generations.

Okay.

What if you don't want to put your quilts away into a box and you want to display them, I say do it and enjoy them while you have them.

A great way to display a quilt is on a bed that can be protected underneath with a plain white sheet displaying away from windows and any kind of external light or light from non LED light bulbs is also recommended.

Light is the biggest agent of deterioration and there is no going back once light damage has occurred, it's it's permanent.

Another thing people like to do is fold their quilt over a wood quilt rack.

I would recommend padding the top of the quilt display rack.

And what that does essentially is create a round buffer so that you don't get a crease line.

If you have to fold the quilt to put... to fit inside of the rack like this, you could go ahead and stuff your folds with sheets as well.

Again, like I mentioned, you will get light damage, especially on the top of the display area where it is more readily exposed to light just the simple hanging of the quilt will can cause some stretch damage and that is usually not repairable either.

So it's good to rotate those out.

Maybe you only have one on display and when you're not using the room and you're not actively displaying it, cover it with a sheet or take it off and box it.

It matters because it was other people's hands on this that are no longer with us.

They're here.

Their stitches remain.

That's what remains of them.

You know, they took pride in every stitch that they... that they made.

And for me as a as a quilter and someone that has done a lot of embroidering to be able to do a piece and then get it completed is a major thing because it takes one stitch at a time.

So each stitch there is joy that comes with pulling that thread through and knowing it's done.

So when you finish an entire quilt, you can imagine the amount of patience and love and energy that went into actually making that quilt or whatever it is that you're sewing.

And these women were very much designers.

They were designing with color, they were designing with space, and they were designing useful objects out of often discarded pieces of cloth.

I think all of these organizations that they had where they got together to do this kind of this kind of work, this kind of social interaction, provided a cohesiveness for the women in the community.

They exchanged a lot of ideas.

I'm sure they weren't just talking sewing.

They were talking how their children were doing that work around anymore and what jobs the children had, what interests there were.

Yeah, it was just a get together to discuss all matters privately and worldly.

It was their way for camaraderie and to visit because they were busy farming with their husbands and taking care of the children and the household.

And so they may not have got away very often.

In fact, we have a story about one lady who her husband took the car and so she was bound and determined to get to the club anyway.

And so she took the tractor because it had been rainy that day.

So isn't that a great story and just how much it meant to the ladies to get together?

If you think about what it means to be able to break bread together, get together, that gives people an opportunity to read each other's energy, to feel that closeness, to feel that love.

You can't get that through a text.

Nothing beats that physical interaction and meeting together.

I am sure that these skills that some of us still possess and some of us still use, I think we still kind of have in us that spirit to create things with our hands.

It's an example of handwork that we don't see often anymore.

It's an example of repurpose and reuse things saved, things loved.

It's a history of your family and where they came from, what was important to them, what was special.

And it's a record of a day to day life and day to day activity and creating beauty in the mundane.