California quilts. (Current and Coming).

Nineteenth-century quilts represented hundreds of hours of work and were full of sentimental significance because they were often bestowed as gifts to mark an important occasion. Therefore it is not surprising that Americans on the move in the nineteenth century took their quilts with them. Women who settled in California not only brought quilts with them but began quilting soon after they arrived. The earliest examples made in California date from the l840s. On view at the FIDM Museum-Galleries at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles is an exhibition entitled Quilts: California Bound, California Made 1840-1940. It presents thirty-eight examples selected by the guest curator, Sandi Fox, a quilt specialist who has also written the book of the same title that accompanies the show.

As Fox relates, there were numerous ways in which quilts were transported to California in the nineteenth century. They were packed in covered wagons, on ships, on mules that traveled byway of the Isthmus of Panama, and, toward the end of the century on trains. The same was true for the fabrics used by California women to make quilts. In one extremely well documented instance, there were five to ten thousand pieces of "Callicoes of every colour," in the words of the merchant Thomas Oliver Larkin, that were part of a cargo worth $120,000. These washed ashore at Monterey following the shipwreck of the Star of the West on July 27, 1845, en route from England to Mexico. Far from ...