Snowballs in May

While some days it has felt like we could still be making snowballs, these snowballs are quilted. This is one of the quilts we are featuring in this year's exhibit, celebrating Canada's 150th with the newly restored and returned Confederation Quilt. One online source stated the snowball pattern is an Amish quilt block pattern. For sure it is a pattern that fools the eye by creating an optical illusion. From a distance, a snowball block looks like a round circle, but it is actually an octagon, an eight-sided figure.Our snowball quilt is made up of 11,396 pieces, all hand-stitched into a full sized quilt by Minnie Main (Frost) Northrup, and was completed by the time she was 11 years old. Yes, eleven. She had started it as a doll bed quilt, but was encouraged to finish it as a full sized quilt. The final photo shows my hand to give a sense of the scale of the pieces used to create the blocks.

Nothing Like a Pair of Home Made Socks . . . or is there

This cool contraption caught my eye this week. The Auto Knitter Hosiery Co. Ltd. was located at 1870 Davenport Road, Toronto, Ontario. During the early 1900’s it shipped knitting machines throughout Canada. It was a way for people to discretely earn a wage cheque by producing socks and other knitted goods at home and sending them to Toronto. Prior to WW1 socks were normally handknit by family members, but the need for multiple changes of socks for the soldiers in the trenches to prevent ‘trench foot’ led to mechanization of this skill. A good hand knitter could complete a pair of socks in a week, but an experienced operator of a circular sock knitting machine could see a pair completed in less than an hour! It is complete including the shipping case, and was shipped to Mrs A Ralph Spragg of Saint John and donated to the museum by her daughter E M Dearman.