Marian Bradshaw Lecture: Canadian Quilts and Their Makers, presented by Lisa Binkley

For centuries in what is now known as Canada, quilts have kept us warm at night and served as vehicles for makers to express their creativity. Drawing on her new book, Canadian Quilts and Their Makers: Design, Material and Place in the Nineteenth Century, Lisa Binkley explores a range of quilt styles—from homespun and patchwork to elegant appliqué and whole-cloth work—to reveal the social, cultural, and economic experiences of their nineteenth-century makers and users. In Canada, quilt making, furthermore, evolved with technological improvements, including new forms of transportation, such as the railway and steam-powered ships, and factory-made cloth and print media, furnishing makers with affordable textiles and myriad new patterns. As settlement extended west from the Maritimes to the mid-west/Prairies, quiltmakers were influenced by their surrounding environments. The quilts presented here offer a glimpse into Canada’s quilt-making history, its relationship to European influences, and how to read quilts as documentary evidence, unravelling aspects of Canadian women’s daily, domestic, and design histories that are often overlooked. 

Hybrid lecture. 

Pictured: Cover of Lisa Binkley’s Canadian Quilts and Their Makers: Design, Material, and Place in the Nineteenth Century published by University of British Columbia Press. Background image of Martha Gervais, Laura, and Emilie Bottineau, Bottineau Quilt, c. 1885-93. Cotton, velvet, satin, and wool, 70-78 in. Made at Red Falls Lake, Minnesota. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.