Standards Met:
SS5E1 Uses the basic economic concepts of trade, opportunity cost, specialization, voluntary exchange, productivity, and price incentives to illustrate historical events.
VA5MC.1 Engages in the creative process to generate and visualize ideas.
VA5MC.3 Selects and uses subject matter, symbols, and/or ideas to communicate meaning.
National Standard 4 Understands the visual arts in relation to history and culture.
VA5CU.1 Investigates and discovers personal relationship to community, culture, and the world through creating and studying art.
VA5PR.2 Understands and applies media, techniques, and processes of two-dimensional art processes using tools and materials in a safe and appropriate manner to develop skills.
Lesson Plan:
As both an art form and necessity, women in the Victorian Era made quilts. Quilting began as a patching process in which one would add a piece of fabric to a worn or ripped place in a blanket. After years of use, the blanket would consist more of patches than of blanket. Eventually this process evolved into linking old textile scraps together. Then patterns came into popularity, which is what we think of typically when we think of a “quilt.” During the Gilded Age, women utilized quilts to show off their embroidery skills, using stitches such as the herringbone, the featherstitch, and the cross-stitch. The patches in the quilt, as well, were cut to fit one another like a jigsaw puzzle, with any design that its maker had in mind. Students can make their own pattern, with any imagery or symbol they have in mind, and they can see examples of different stitches in the sampler inside the Traveling Trunk, from which they can pull ideas.
For this exercise, you will need old magazines that can be cut from, scraps of construction paper, tissue paper, or even scraps of fabrics; colored pencils or fabric paint; glue sticks; and scissors. There is much room for variation, but the basic idea is to have the students plan their own crazy quilt. They can begin on a large, clean piece of paper by drawing their pattern, or they can start by cutting pieces to fit one another. Either way, the students will cut out patterns from the magazines, or colors from the other scraps, and fit them together in a jigsaw sort of formation. Once assembled, each scrap should be glued onto the larger piece of paper until none of that sheet shows.
When the glue has dried, the students will go back over the crazy quilt pieces and “stitch” them together using colored pencils or fabric paint. (Again, they may refer back to the sampler or other pictures of crazy quilts to see different stitches.)
