Nebraska Quilts and Quiltmakers

Excessively sober writing here does not suppress a wealth of social history unearthed by a five-year effort to catalogue and preserve a state's heritage in quilts. Favoring representativeness over aesthetics, the Nebraska Quilt Project committee presents styles from all periods of local history, with descriptions of the quilters; 103 color plates and 89 black-and-white photos, many of them vintage, illustrate the text. The profiles brim with suggestive details: the darkness of their sod house obliged a frontier mother and daughter to quilt outdoors; another quilter is said to have been the model for Willa Cather's My Antonia. And where the bedding is concerned, there are some beauties, including one quilt so intricate that each of its blocks, made up of eight pieces, is the size of a postage stamp. But most are honest, rather ordinary work--one pieced quilt features a conspicuously misplaced block, for example--and color sense often reflects clear limitations. Crews is an associate professor of textiles at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Naugle is a professor of history at Nebraska Wesleyan University. (Aug.)