#CLIPPINGZ! The caption states: "PADDED TULIP -- Adeline Scofield Briggs of Fairfield CONN was born in 1834 and lived until 1924, during which she made several quilts. This one is of her own design and was obviously used and loved until it came to rest, in the box which she painted for it, in the Stamford Historical Society's Hoyt Farm House. The ingenuity, craftsmanship, and true artistic talent of America's needlewomen is displayed so refreshingly in works like this where no commercial pattern was used and imaginative touches such as the box were added with a great sense of fun."

I love to imagine the life of ancestral artists such as Mrs. Briggs. Did she have "fun" as the book suggests? Was she treated as an artist among her friends and family? Was she bored, restricted, educated, busy with housework and children in addition to her designerly needlework? We know she was a Mrs....and despite being a woman in 19th century America, she was privileged enough to make it into a book published by an official society of his-story! What about the women around her whose needlework did not make it into the official books and therefore we may never see? This analogue book may never be digitized. Briggs quilt and box may soon turn to dust, despite the efforts of conservators.

The photograph of her work speaks to me in particular. I appropriate her design, "Padded Tulip,"into my ceramic pieces, with the inscripted caption written by hand on the back ofany platters I may make with this design, to honored, in veritable stone, Adeline Scofield Briggs as an artist who preceded the internet.

Taken from a lovely old book called American Quilts, where a pattern for padded tulip is available to trace.