Vintage Thursday Thingie: Embroidered Bonnet Girl Quilt

I purchased this outline embroidered Bonnet Girl summer coverlet on E-bay a few years ago…yes, it was a bargain-it cost me all of $10.00! I’m not sure when its from but I would guess the 1960s, mainly because of the brown fabric…course the orange could mean the 1970s. Its technically not a quilt as there is no batting.

Bonnet Girl quilts became very popular in the 1920s and have lots of different names...there's Umbrella Girl (my girl has both an umbrella and a bonnet!), Southern Belle , and Crinoline Lady !

I wish I could have photographed it better but here's a close-up of one of the blocks from the center row. The center row of blocks are the lightest and were done with orange to yellow graduated floss. This row also shows the most wear and there is even one block with half the umbrella/parasol missing.

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The outer rows are partially done with the graduated floss and then finished with brown.

( Wondering about what's peaking through? I'll get to that soon.)

This coverlet is tied-another one of the reasons that I love owning it! The ties were done with 100% wool so when the "quilt" was washed the yarn shrank up and formed these balls. The only quilty memory I have from childhood is sleeping at my Aunt Anne's and she had covers with these wonderful little balls on them!

This entire coverlet is made from sugar sacks! She used the best parts-with no printing-for the front.

The back is made up with sugar sacks turned so that the writing is inside the coverlet but it is still noticeable. Since there is no batting, it is quite easy to read. All of the sacks were 10 lbs. and were from two companies: The Amalgamated Sugar Company and the Utah Idaho Company.

With a little time spent with Google I discovered some fascinating things. These were both sugar beet companies. The Ogden, Utah plant was founded in 1898 and merged with other plants to become the Amalgamated Sugar Co. in 1915. A sugar beet processing plant was built in Garland in 1903 by the LDS Church and was merged with others from Idaho to form the Utah Idaho Sugar Company in 1907.

One of the bags says Chinook, Montana…a little research here informed me that there had been a large sugar beet processing plant serving the area, a large sugar beet growing center until “business collapsed among manipulations of the commodities market back in the early 1950’s”!
You can read here about sugar hoarding (over 5 million pounds!) in this NY Times article from 1919… I’m telling you the sugar business was not sweet!

I really love the back of this quilt-I love these sugar sacks! I love that they say “ A Product of American Farms” and “Pure Granulated” and “Fine Granulated Table and Preserving Sugar”.

I love this quilt…I love the woman who made it! She took sugar sacks and a bit of floss and made a summer spread-I like to think- to dress up her daughter’s bedroom.

I like this Bonnet Girl so much that I have traced the design and started embroidering my own blocks-I’ll show you two later this week and I’ll share the tracing so if you like Bonnet Girls as much as me-stop back!

Be sure to hop on over to Coloradolady and see all the other vintage treasures being shared today on Vintage Thursday Thingie!!