Merikay Waldvogel reads quilts as though they’re historical documents, scanning for clues to their life stories. A nationally known quilt historian and curator, she can tell a lot from the details, sometimes divining pasts that surprise the owners.

Merikay Waldvogel will appear at Sweet Briar on Oct. 21. More photosDating quilts is “not magic,” though, says Waldvogel, who has spent 30-plus years learning the particulars. “Sometimes people bring in quilts they think were made in the 1920s and we can tell them it was made much earlier than that based on fabrics and style and pattern.”

Quilt owners and spectators can find out how it’s done at “A Quilt Road Show” with Waldvogel from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Oct. 21 in the Anne Gary Pannell Art Gallery at Sweet Briar College. The event is being held in conjunction with “Anonymous America,” an exhibition of “outsider” art running through Dec. 3 in the gallery. Admission to both is free.

Waldvogel will give a brief walking tour of the quilts in the exhibit, including 19th- and 20th-century pieces from her own collection – an exception she made for Sweet Briar. She rarely shows them far from her home in Knoxville, Tenn.

Among those on loan for the show are log cabin, tobacco flannels and crazy quilts; a pictorial folk art quilt by Helen Fleenor of East Tennessee, an art deco-style fan quilt, and a “Trip Around the World” quilt called “American Tapestry.”

Quilt owners won’t leave the “Road Show” knowing how much money their prized possessions are worth, but they’ll know what they have, documented on a one-page certificate of authentication. It will include the piece’s approximate age, the name of the pattern if known, fabric, suggestions for its care and any interesting history that Waldvogel can discern from her examination.

She starts by asking what the owner knows about the quilt. It can mean debunking a family legend. “[Someone] will say this one was made during the Civil War and hidden with the silver,” Waldvogel said. “The quilt historian who’s good at this will look at it and say these are pastel colors from the 1920s.”

She’s also been able to tell people they own a museum-quality piece that should be carefully preserved.

A quilt’s overall canvas design is described as its style. They come and go and come back again, often leading to confusion about a quilt’s age. Styles include center medallions; whole-cloth masterpieces in which the quilting stitches provide the only, painstaking décor; and equal-sized blocks sewn together, which was popularized in the mid-1800s and revived a century later.

Although quilters often follow patterns to the stitch, they also are known for deliberately coloring outside the lines. Many quilts are individual expressions of art. Some start out adhering meticulously to a pattern and veer suddenly into wild variations. One such eccentric rendering seduced Waldvogel – who is schooled in linguistics – into collecting quilts.

“My career diverged at the point when I saw this one quilt in Chicago,” she said. “It spoke to me.”

Since then she’s become well known among enthusiasts for her lectures and quilt assessments, as well as the author or co-author of the books, “Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930,” “Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression,” “Southern Quilts: Surviving Relics of the Civil War” and “Patchwork Souvenirs of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.”

For more information, please e-mail rmlane@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6248.


This 1990s piece by Helen Fleenor features her distinctive hand-appliquéd and embroidered pictorial images and sayings.


The “Friendship Fan” pattern in the Art Deco style was introduced in the 1930s in the Laura Wheeler quilt column that appeared in newspapers across the country.