Coverlets: I never met a textile I didn’t like

On my annual summer visit to western NY, my Dad had planned an outing for us to Palmyra to the “Alling Coverlet Museum“. I wasn’t actually sure what a coverlet was and my Dad’s descriptions didn’t help, but it sure was a fun thing to do given my passion for fabric, textiles and quilting. And in the category of “I never met a textile I didn’t like” he was right. These woven spreads had been a fixture from childhood and seeing a whole collection of them and the looms that made them was intriguing.

There is a rotating display of these coverlets here and it takes six years to go through them all, so there is always something new up. And the Pops bought me the museum book American Coverlets and Their Weavers by Clarita S. Anderson which is brilliant as it seems to have the best of the best of the six years of coverlets in there. Most of these coverlets were made between 1820 and 1880 and the books covers the origins of the weavers and it divided up by state–New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, the Virginas and Indiana. They also have a room of quilts and other textiles of course! (Doesn’t everybody?)