"Housetop" with "Bear's Paw" center medallion

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    Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
1972
Cotton and cotton/polyester blend
96 x 79 inches
Collection of
Toledo Museum of Art
Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description

One of the Freedom Quilting Bee’s outlets in the early 1970s was Artisans Cooperative in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, which featured a "Bear's Paw" from the bee on its brochure's cover. Estelle Witherspoon, one of the bee's founders and its longtime co-manager, created a quilt in 1972 for her own use employing the "Bear's Paw" motif as a single-block medallion in a traditional "Housetop" format. Most quilting bee workers made quilts all day for money and then returned home to make more quilts for family use. Often they would take a pattern that they used repeatedly at work—where stitches and color combinations were predetermined—and vary it at home in ways that barely resembled the quilting bee's advertised patterns and products.