Scary Stories (Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE)

I save horror pictures---the kind where a quilt fades so badly the original design is significantly changed.

For Halloween I thought I'd scare you

with pictures of quilts made between 1880 and 1920

when the new synthetic dyes were so unreliable you could start with two identical looking reds

and after one washing wind up with a little red and a lot of tan.

Do notice that the spiky points in this New York Beauty/Rocky Mount quilt are almost completely faded to white.
Boo!

The worst culprit in the gang of fugitive dyes was red.

But green also disappeared...

Could this happen to YOU?
Unlikely today because we use more color-fast dyes. But that's the point of goblins---they could be under the bed.

Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin Sculpture, 1998