Feature: Patty Harants - BAS's Southern Representative

By Janet Esch

In May, 2006, during the BAS board meeting, I first saw Patty Harants' name--twice within minutes: first in The Appliqué Society's Newsletter that Barbara Burnham had brought for me to see and then on the new members' list. "Here is something to pursue," I thought and later that night I went into Patty's website (http://www.pattyharantsapplique.com/bio.htm). Within seconds of my phone call to her, I knew she was someone to feature. Her voice radiated friendliness and warmth. Immediately we established links: Born in Michigan--she even knew of my little town on Lake Huron, life on a farm, German heritage, and even being left-handed. And when she offered to send me her book and the right to use pictures and material from her website, I knew this article would be fun to write.

It certainly has been in Patty Harants' stars to become the artist and quilt designer that she is today. Her mother, a well known interior designer in Detroit, introduced her to the beauty of color, design, texture and shape. She would go to furniture stores and decorator shops in Chicago and Detroit where she learned to "feel" fabric as her mother worked for "high-end" customers by selecting only the best and most beautiful. Patty said, "I would tag along to clients' homes and listen as she wowed them with her presentations. My grandmother taught me embroidery and my mother taught me the love of color." After studying art in college but with marketable skills, she was advised by her father that while "she could not make a living painting in Greenwich Village, she could always fall back on teaching." And so she did, for a few years.

She married and raised her children on a farm in Tilden, Ohio. There gardens and quilt shops and auctions--and of course collecting quilts, many of them made by farm wives, furthered Patty's love for color and design. She inherited the innate sense of recognizing beauty around her and the left-handed talent for seeing design in her world and replicating it. (Her grandmother, mother, cousins and several of her children are left-handed.)

Moving from Ohio to New England, she was soon facing the need to help in the financing of her children's college education. "I asked my mother what I should do; she followed with a question, ‘What do you do best?' Thus I became an interior designer and soon became a senior designer for a large company in Boston." There she worked on such major places as the Louisa May Alcott House in Sturbridge Village. Her focus was historical restoration. Her work was very successful. When her husband's job took him to Memphis TN, Patty sold her business and retired, but of course did not retire.

As "a lady of leisure" Patty attended a quilt guild meeting. And the fun began, from her collection of old quilts to her historical design business to a quilt guild--all fulfilling her love of textiles. "I would draw a little and then try to sew it down." It gave her the opportunity to fulfill her desire "to feel fabric, something I learned to do as child with my mother. Since her children and many friends were in New England, she often traveled between the North and her southern home with natural stops in Baltimore and Harrisburg PA. Her natural talent--and she gives credit to important teachers such as Mimi Dietrich, Nancy Chong, Irma Gail and others who presented and taught at the guild seminars in Memphis--brought her to see quilts all around her. Following an interest in her father's German heritage, she went to the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg to research Frakturs. There she met with Beatrice Hulsberg, the acting director of Community and Domestic Life. Patty asked to see the collection and Beatrice suggested that perhaps she would like to see the documentation of quilts that the museum had--many never shown to the public. We can all hear Patty's reply, "WOULD I?"

Frakturs are the familiar Pennsylvania Dutch drawing made in the early 1880's, often religious, often used in certificates as birth, baptism or even awards to schoolchildren. Patty replicated and modified the Fraktur designs to create "The Fraktur Wedding Tree." She also adapted the center block to become a wall hanging on which the couples' names can be inked with "plenty of room on the tree for names of children and pets.

Fraktur Quilt

She has completed many other replications of quilts from numerous museums. At the Lancaster Quilt and Textile Museum she had been asked to teach a seminar and then has been given the privilege of tracing a quilt from their collection and teaching it. Seminar will seminar and then has been offered the privilege of tracing a quilt from their collection and teaching it Seminar will take place in September, 2007, on the "First Friday."

From one of Patty's first visits to the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Patty saw the "Cradle Quilt" made by Rebecca Kohler, of Berks County PA, for her son Jacob in 1832. What delight she felt when the museum gave her permission to replicate it. The pattern is a traced modification of the Cradle Quilt. Patty used the exact colors with historical fabrics "as close as I could match them." As with many quilts there is very little information about Rebecca and her son Jacob. The quilt can be seen in her book, Patricia E. Harants Lifestyle Collection: The Wickersham Signature Quilt ISBN: 0-9748463-1-7 as a miniature made by Judith Day of Sydney Australia.

Cradle Quilt

This book also includes patterns of the Wickersham Signature Quilt Circa 1884, perhaps the most famous of Patty's replications. It was created by Patty and "women associated with the Memphis Appliqué Society and many talented ‘Dear Jane' ladies so dear to me. Also the dearest lady in Goshen, Indiana, Mary Helmuth did the marvelous hand quilting, according to the orginally traced quilted stitches with 12 stitches to the inch. Without their help this quilt would not have been completed in time for the 100th anniversary of the museum," Patty says.

In the center of the quilt are two blocks that read, "John Wickersham was born Dec. 1780 died 22 Feb. 1853" and "Rebecca Wickersham was born the 6th day of the 3rd month of 1791." Because there is no death date for Rebecca, it is possible that she made the quilt as a memorial for her husband. The quilt is signed by fifty-seven people with thirty-nine identified signers who lived in northern York County, PA in 1850 and are related to the Wickersham family. This quilt is PA's version of the Baltimore Album.

Wickersham Quilt

From all her contacts and studies, Patty put together The Patricia E. Harants Lifestyle Collection: The Wickersham Signature Quilt book which has 63 full size 10" patterns with replications accompanied by the originals found in the State Museum of Pennsylvania. She has donated this book to BAS's library.

Also from the designs of the Wickersham quilt, Patty has made a hooked rug pattern and hooked it herself. She says, "I must try it all." However, she has decided that she has too many projects and she wants to move on so she sold all of her wool in July, 2006.

In the 1800's tussie mussies were small bouquets of flowers and herbs used to improve the ordor in the rooms--like room deodorizers. From such a quilt and inspired by her garden of flowers especially her love of Lily of the Valley, Bleeding Hearts, Pansies, Roses and ferns, Patty made her first design and added bees and butterflies. She took it to the International Quilt Market at Houston in 1999 and rather reluctantly showed it to people at the Benartex Company's booth. They immediately offered to sponsor the design and gave her all of the fabric that she needed.

Tussie Mussie Quilt

Patty continues to design, replicate and now she has a line of fabric coming out called "Lancaster Heritage Collections" with Baum Textiles. It is inspired by German papercuts with colors used in historic designs: hazelnut, military blues, maroons, and shades of rose among many others. She also is working on an historic restoration of homes of the 1700's in Conneticut. The painting of the wall paper shows up in her fabric.

With her three child established in creative careers, Patty travels and lectures: September 19, 2006, to Sydney Australia, to teach a seminar; then there is Houston in October and Shipshewanna, IN, to Lolly's Quilt Shop to look at the old quilt blocks that Lolly has found (perhaps some new designs) and of course to Lancaster Quilt Textile Museum and the list goes on.

Tomorrow, however, since her husband is out-of-town, with her friend, Peggy Erwin, another BAS member from Memphis, and four other friends, "dear Jane gals," she will be quilting feathers and swags. She doesn't just sit. And the world of quilting offers again to another quilter a fulfilling retirement life.