Contents:
About this first issue
Most of this material (okay, all of it) was published at Exceedingly Curious, the website that first posted the scans of the 1886 catalog. In the fall of 2007, Curious suffered a total crash. There were backups, but efforts to restore them failed.Rather than rebuilt the old site -- which was a very eclectic blog, J. F. Ingalls being just a small part of it -- I decided to break out the Ingalls catalog and give it its own place on the web. And here we are.
I'm grateful for those who allowed me to feature their redwork projects at Exceedingly Curious, and am proud to reshare some of that material (ha) here. Photos are the property of the artists and are used by permission.
If you would like your work to appear in an issue of J. F. Ingalls Magazine, write and send pictures to john@jfingalls.com.
Louise Tiemann
Louise Tiemann, of New York, collects quilts and quilt related ephemera from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, with a focus on series quilts, and gives lectures about her collection. She teaches redwork embroidery at Sew Many Quilts in Johnson City, NY.If you like this site, you are going to love Louise's. It's called Quilt Papers.
In July of 2007, Louise shared with me a picture of a fan she had embroidered and some info about how she extracted the design from the Ingalls catalog. (Louise uses this picture as her avatar at Quilt Papers. Way cool.)
To create the pattern, Louise isolated the fan design from one of the scanned pages of the catalog, then enlarged it to fit on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.
"This made a very blurred image, but using that and the catalog, I redrafted the design using Power Point — yes point by point, line by line, each one carefully placed to recreate the image. I used 400% magnification and got a bit dizzy looking at the blurred lines, but the outcome is a nice clean drawing," Louise explained.
She used a 10×10-inch square of Kona Cotton White for the base fabric, plus almost two skeins of DMC blue # 797. It took her a week to embroider the fan, which is about 6.5 x 7.5 inches.
Lovely job, Louise. You are an inspiration.
Yvonne
In July, 2007, Yvonne -- known in the quilting world as yquiltsalot -- sent me this photo. Some of the designs on it look like they came right of of Ingalls.
She says:
"I have an old redwork quilt -- well, more of a coverlet -- that was given to my husband’s great-grandmother by a friend in 1897.
"The redwork designs were each done on a square of fabric, then the squares were sewn together. No batting, no backing. Just the one layer, the thickness of a sheet.
"It hangs in my diningroom -- yes, a bit baggy in places, but we should look so good at that age, eh? It’s a good example of redwork, though. There was a tremendous interest in the patterns on this quilt when I showed it to my quilt guild [Evergreen Piecemakers] a few years ago -- when it hit 100 years old!
"It’s not a very good photo . . . . In the bottom right hand corner it says 'To Minnie 1897' (?) Underneath that 'Jesse M. Tooke.' I haven’t had any luck tracking down Jesse in the census records, but Minnie was Minne Kirkland Dawley, my husband’s great-grandmother. Pretty cool, hmmm?"
Yvonne's website -- where you can not only see good-looking quilts, but also Yvonne's pretty darn good-looking family -- is www.yquiltsalot.blogspot.com
Thanks for sharing, Yvonne.
J. F. Ingalls and Laura Ingalls Wilde
A question many people have is, "Were J. F. and Laura (author of the Little House books) related, and if so, how?"The answer is provided by a modern-day relative of Laura's.
Jay Ingalls, who collects genealogical info on the Ingalls family, says:
"We started doing genealogy research when our youngest daughter was repeatedly asked 'Are you related to Laura Ingalls?' That was in the early days of the "Little House on the Prairie"TV series.
"It took a while, but we believe we know the connection now. Laura is also our distant cousin, through the sons of Edmund Ingalls, who came to this country in 1628. He is the first person listed on the attached relationship chart."
The chart shows that James Frederick Ingalls is the seventh cousin one time removed of Laura Elizabeth (Mayflower) Ingalls.
The (Mayflower)s in the chart are there because Laura’s great grandmother was Margaret Delano, of the famed Delano family, who was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren.
In his email, Jay said there are still questions about the name of Edmund Ingalls’ wife, and her ancestry.
He also said:
"We collect genealogy info on all Ingalls in the USA & Canada. Gedcom files are appreciated, that saves my time and prevents adding my errors.
"A lot of the first ancestry data on the internet on Laura’s ancestry came from our research, and info from other researchers before us that was shared with us.
"We are still working on the children of Benjamin Ingalls, # 539 in Burleigh’s 1903 book on the Ingalls family. We are quite sure that we are descendants of Benjamin’s first wife, Margery Cass. We think we have just identified another line of descendants from Benjamin’s second wife, who was Sally Thomas per Burleigh’s book. Always more to find and prove as best we can.
"If anyone has questions about genealogy research or gedcom files or genealogy software programs, I will try to help."
Jay's email address is jay_ingalls@pipeline.com.
Carinne
My old site, Exceedingly Curious, received a lovely write-up by Carinne, of Belgium, in her excellent blog, Bien le Bonjour aux Brodeuses -suiteCarinne has put some of the Ingalls designs to good use, extracting the drawings and reworking them into excellent patterns. Photos of her work can be found here and here.
I used a Little Bo Peep design to make a lame cartoon.
Here's what Carinne did with the same design.
Carinne's work was pointed out to me by Gigi of Gigi on line, whose site has many stunning photographs of needlework delights.
There is so much goodness at both their websites that I spent much time reading and looking at the pics. Wow.
Thanks, Carinne. Thanks, Gigi.
Kay Balsley
Here is a photo I recieved from Kay Balsley.
She says,
"I wanted to send you a pic of the first redwork I’ve done from the Ingalls catalog (from page 114). I loved how it turned out, and can’t wait to get started on more!!
"Thank you again for sharing your treasure trove of designs!!"
Thank you, Kay. Nice work.
And thus ends issue one of the J. F. Ingalls Magazine. I need articles and photos for issue two.