I found this one in a crafter's estate. A box of books I only looked at once I'd already made it home. As I went to photograph it for listing, the title caught me first: Dear Jane: The Two Hundred Twenty-Five Patterns from the 1863 Jane A. Stickle Quilt, by Brenda Manges Papadakis. It sounded specific in a way that made me think there had to be a real quilt behind it. There was.
The quilt itself
Jane A. Stickle made her quilt in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. It's pieced cotton with a linen backing, made up of 169 blocks, each about five inches square, and every single one is a different pattern. Add in the border and the total count of pieces comes to 5,602. She labeled it herself, "In War Time, 1863," along with the piece count and her own name, which was not a common thing to do on a quilt at that point in history.
The quilt survived. It got passed down through relatives after Jane and her husband had no children of their own, and it turned up again during the Depression years with a relative in St. Louis. Since the family knew Jane had been from Vermont, it made its way to the Bennington Museum, where it still lives. It's fragile enough now that it only comes out for public display once a year, Labor Day through Indigenous Peoples' Day, and quilters travel in specifically for that window.
How the book happened
The book exists because of one quilter's very specific obsession.
In the early '90s, Brenda Papadakis came across a photo of Jane's quilt in a book called Plain and Fancy, and the geometry of the blocks stopped her. She was teaching Amish, Japanese, and Baltimore quilting styles at the time, and with the help of Barbara Brackman's research on block design, she worked out that only about 30% of Jane's blocks were based on traditional patterns. The other 70% were Jane's own.
In 1992, Brenda traveled to Vermont with her grandson to see the quilt in person and started tracing it, block by block, by hand. That turned into five years of research, both into the patterns themselves and into Jane's life. What came out of it in 1996 was this book: line drawings of all 169 blocks plus the 52 triangle border patterns and 4 corner blocks, 225 patterns total, along with a series of letters Brenda wrote addressed to Jane, imagining her way into what life might have looked like for a woman quilting through the Civil War.
That's also where the nickname comes from. The blocks made from Brenda's patterns get called "Baby Janes," and the whole project, and everyone who's since taken it on, gets called Dear Jane.
Why quilters actually care
The book has sold something like 140,000 copies since 1996, which is a strange number for a book of quilt patterns with no construction instructions in it at all, just diagrams and letters. But that turns out to be part of the appeal. Working from Dear Jane means figuring out your own construction method for each block, which has made it as much a puzzle to solve as a pattern to follow.
It's spawned an entire subculture. There's an active online community built entirely around Dear Jane quilts, in every color palette imaginable, from Civil War reproduction fabrics to batiks to bright modern lines. People spend years on a single quilt, some by hand, some through multiple full block-by-block passes. It's less a pattern anymore and more a rite of passage, a thing a certain kind of quilter eventually decides to take on.
What I'm taking from this
I didn't know any of this an hour before I started reading. I just knew the title was specific enough to be worth looking into, and it turned into a whole rabbit hole: one woman's quilt made during a war, kept safe by family who barely knew what they had, found again by a museum, and then found again 130 years later by another quilter who got obsessed enough to spend five years turning it into something the rest of us could actually attempt.
That's the part of this job I keep coming back to. Every piece that comes through here was made by somebody, for some reason, and every once in a while the reason turns out to have a whole documented history behind it. This book is going up for sale, and whoever buys it is getting a lot more than 225 patterns.
