The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt and Social History

The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt: Letters from 1920s farm wives and the 111 blocks they inspired by Laurie Aaron Hird was in the pile of books and binders I pulled off my shelves for inspiration for my next creation.

As I was flipping through the designs (Who reads a quilt pattern book?), a picture of a woman with a blush in her cheeks and snow shoes on her back caught my eye. It was the cover of The Farmer’s Wife - A Magazine for Farm Women dated January 1922. Why was this in a quilting book? And so I began to read. The book is about the social history of 1920, specifically about farm women of 1922.

The magazine ran a contest asking if their subscribers, knowing what they did now, would want their daughters to marry a farmer. The book includes some of those answers, along with quilt blocks.

If you’re interested in social history, you’ll love hearing the thoughts of these women.

If you like to quilt, the book includes a CD with templates of the pattern pieces. If you’ve quilted before, you’ll hate it. I balked at printing out 106 pieces of paper, each with a small pattern piece. Someone condensed it down to 15 pages, but you have to subscribe to download the file (free for the first 30 days). I have no intention of tracing piece after piece when I can cut faster and cleaner with a ruler. I ended up creating a PDF with the information I needed for cutting. I’m an advanced beginner/intermediate quilter, so an expert would be better, but I did okay. Please don’t ask for information about the quilt block patterns, as that would violate Hird’s copyright.

Farmer's Wife Quilt

42.3KB ∙ PDF file

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Here are the highlights of the project.

First, I like to chain quilt.

This was the hardest block for me so far. I recommend using the templates so things line up perfectly. I ended up taking this apart three times before I decided this was good enough.

For most of the blocks, I used the half-square triangle method. Even though I cut the dog ears over the trash can, I end up with tiny fabric nips all over the house.

There were no directions for the handles for the two basket blocks, and I had to turn to YouTube to learn how to do those.

I usually do my pin basting on the floor, but a queen-size quilt is worthy of setting up the rack. It took me three tries before I got the layers together right.

As you can see, the quilt is bigger than my floor space.

And the finished project is far from perfect, but it does the job — it’s pretty, and it will keep my son and daughter-in-law warm. I was very careful to get the baskets oriented correctly, but I missed that some of the other blocks needed to be oriented.