Customer Reviews

Warman's Vintage Quilts: Identification And Price Guide

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As a quilt lover, I adore this book. I look to vintage quilts for ideas and inspiration, along with use of color and pattern. Turning the 250+ pages of this book is like touring a fine quilt museum and being able to take photos home with you.

As I marvel over each page, I love to imagine the quilt makers as they chose fabrics and colors. The section on Log Cabin design illustrates how very crafty the quilters were at embodying Sunshine & Shadow shadings, and even the most straightforward 1-patch or multi-patch designs come alive with strong use of color placement. The rather bland album-style quilts are also shown to be capable of surprising the viewer; a "Redwork Signature Quilt" from the 1920's delights in the way the signatures themselves are used to form the block outlines.

There is a brief section on African American Quilts, but it is unceremoniously placed toward the very end of the book. This could be because they are scarce and hard to date, as the author states, but they deserve more prominence and depth than is provided here. A little more hard research and several more examples would have been wonderful.

But if you are a vintage quilt collector, appraiser, or re-seller, this might not be the best resource for you. While this book has over 300 fine examples with lovely photos, there is not much detail for each piece. Only one or two sentences describe each quilt, although the author does supply about 20 pages of text as an introduction. But even this is somewhat simplistic; I personally would rather have seen more written for each quilt individually.

The book with values is useful to me as a quilt appraiser, but is lacking two things in the description of each quilt: 1) the condition of each quilt
and
2) the measurements of each quilt.

Excellent book on value and variety of vintage quilts- when my brother and I were young my mother began cross stitching a quilt kit with stamped Baltimore Album quilt designs on it. Of course she was a working Mom and taking care of a husband and two kids and didn't get it completed. She worked on it for a number of years on vacation, etc. and has 80% of the designs cross stitched. We found it in this book valued at $750.00! Wow- I am urging her to finish it for the grand kids!