History
The maker was Elizabeth Garrett, born Elizabeth Butler about 1870 and died 1946. It was made about 1910 at Box Hill, Melbourne Victoria. The quilt was passed from Elizabeth Garrett to her daughter Elsie Garrett Hanna and then to Elsie's daughter Mrs Val Skinner of Mosman NSW. Val Skinner gave the quilt to the Australian Costume and Textile Society and it subsequently came to the Powerhouse Museum when the ACTS collection was transferred there in 1983. It is used for research and exhibition purposes only. "The family landed at Portland and joined the gold rush; later they moved to James Street, Box Hill, where this quilt was made and later still moved to the bush outside Melbourne. Elizabeth was one of seven girls and one boy and was the dressmaker for the family. Elizabeth was married and had three children at the time the quilt was made, around 1910. Her first daughter Elsie was born in 1893. In January 1986 Val Skinner, the maker's granddaughter, said that everyone in the family used the quilt when they went camping and that later on, when they could afford to buy bed covers, it went under the bed." [PHM]
Description
"A double-sided patchwork quilt machine-pieced from plain and patterned rectangular woollen patches, each 130 x 200mm. The fabrics came from a tailor's swatch book of men's, and possibly women's, suiting samples and are mainly in tonings of olive green, brown, blue and cream. The two layers are bound together with a pieced border strip that forms the outside edge. There is no filling or quilting." [PHM]
2140 x 1660mm
