Sunbonnet Sue & Overall Sam, Still Kickin'

"A Meeting of the Sunbonnet Children"

by Betty J Hagerman (1979)

I never set out to collect Sunbonnet Sue & Overall Sam quilts.

Then how did so many wind up in my Quilt Cabin?

That could be a rather long story. How about we go with the short version. As I was moving quilts about the cabin recently, I suddenly realized I had so many SBS quilts that I could no longer ignore the fact that I must have been unconsciously collecting them. 

Most are rather eccentric and roughly made though. The photo below says it all.

(Below) Overall Sam/Bill hides his light under a lampshade.

However, there are a few very nicely made examples as well.

The most exciting part of collecting is the hunt, some say. But for me, there is also the documentation. That is another kind of "hunt" and requires time and sleuthing skills....and often sheer luck. Take "Sue Dusting the Flowers" as a case in point, a quilt added to my collection in November 2017. Whimsical, no?  I had never seen one like it before!

Now to find the source of the pattern. 

The first thing I did was check my copy of Betty Hagerman's book which you saw at the beginning of this post. Nada.....though there were a couple of designs that one could see might have inspired someone to rift in this direction, creating their own unique variation of SBS. But there certainly was no exact match.

Then I checked two other books in my personal library: Quilts for Babies & Children by Dolores A. Hinson (1983), Barbara Brackman's "Encyclopedia of Applique" (1993). Again, nothing.

But Lady Luck came a knocking the very next month via eBay. Though she didn't bring me the complete answer, she gave me a strong clue as to where to go digging next.......published embroidery patterns maybe?

Somebody inspired somebody.  Which came first?  The embroidered version or 

the appliqued version? What do you think? 

If you have any leads or clues, please leave a comment!

I hope to hang an exhibit of my eclectic SBS and Overall Sam collection next May or June telling the history if images of children and human figures on quilts. The exhibit will be here on Lopez island and will be a fund fund raiser for the maintenance of Woodman Hall, one of the oldest community buildings on the island. I hope to wrap it in with a meeting of the Washington Quilt Study Group as well  so stay tuned!

(I think we need to tweak this sign a bit so it is Sue & Sam doing the sawing!)

Click here to see more of my wacky SBS quilts and tops.

PS: See it again here: http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/05/sue-narratives.html

Appliqued Girls in Bonnets and Scotty Dogs

I wrote the following for an exhibit I put together of some of my crib quilts in 2010. Eventually I'll add some more history to the Sunbonnet motif as I discover it. A great source for the history of what we have come to call the Sunbonnet Sue pattern is Dolores Hinson's 1983 "The Sunbonnet Family of Quilt Patterns."  If you would like to add more research sources, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog.

Scotties (and West Highland Whites) were very popular in the USA from the 1920s through the 1950s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous Scottie (Fala) brought the breed to the public’s attention once more but did not create the Scottie sensation in the USA to begin with.

Girls in bonnets were first popularized in 1878 by the publication of Kate Greenway first illustrated book. In 1884 the first knock-off Kate Greenway illustrations were published for needlework. Bertha Corbett self-published her first illustrated storybook The Sunbonnet Babies in 1900. Bernhardt Wall, another early 20th century artist, also got into the act and created his own distinctive bonneted little girls plus Overall Sam. Over the last century both Corbett’s and Wall’s simplified designs have been adapted for Redwork embroidery. Sunbonnet embroidery patters were certainly in the Ladies Art Catalogue (St. Louis, MO) by 1910.

But when did the popular Sunbonnet Sue applique patterns appear?

The earliest I have found is Marie Webster's appliqued Sunbonnet Lassies. It appeared in the pages of the Ladies Home Journal in August 1912. Were there any earlier renditions of SBS in applique published in a popular magazine? When did it take on the name, Sunbonnet Sue instead of Sunbonnet Lassies?

Sunbonnet Sue as an appliquéd figure really took off in the early 1930s and remained very popular through the 1960s. In the 1930s outline black embroidery was often added around appliquéd figures.

This particular crib quilt is not as finely made as most you will see from the 1930s and is rather crudely embroidered around the appliqué. It is a very thick quilt yet hand quilted. It is the first Sunbonnet Sue quilt I have personally seen with the Scottie dog added.