Quilted Treasure: Family Heirlooms and Dating Fabrics

Name: Quilted Treasure: Family Heirlooms and Dating Fabrics
Start: 2025-04-27T13:00:00-04:00
Location: 201 6th Ave, Johnstown, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 15906

Schedule

Sun, 27 Apr, 2025 at 01:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

201 6th Ave, Johnstown, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 15906 | Johnstown, PA

Throughout history quilts have been an important handmade household item and passed down through generations. There are a few ways to find out when a quilt was made based on the style and the fabrics used! Did you know that the date of a quilt depends on the newest fabric found in the quilt?
Over the past year, presenter Laura Raftery has dated and examined Heritage Johnstown’s collection of over 30 historic quilts. From the 1840s to the 1980s, these quilts vary in styles from crazy quilt to applique and so much more. She will use some of these quilts as examples to show different styles and techniques, and to demonstrate how to date a quilt.
Amy Regan, Heritage Johnstown curator, will go over how to store your quilt to help maintain quilts for generations to come.
This event is free and open to the public!
About the presenter: Laura Raftery’s fascination with history and textiles began in her childhood, watching her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother quilt, embroider, and sew. She has explored knitting, crocheting, weaving, spinning, and dyeing fabrics with local plants as well as alkaline and acid dyes. Raftery has taken classes with the late Bobbi Aug on how to identify historic textiles, and has studied historic gold work techniques at the Royal School of Needlework in London. What she finds most fascinating about vintage and antique quilts is the role they played in everyday lives — the colorful bits of fabric, how they were arranged, and the evidence of use tell the story of people, usually unknown, that handled the quilt.