Iris Garland Quilt

Iris Garland was designed and appliqued by Hannah Haynes Headlee of Topeka around 1935. An unknown needleworker did the quilting.

Headlee was influenced by a small group of women in Emporia, Kansas, who produced some of the 20th century's finest quilts. Two with international reputations are Rose Kretsinger and Charlotte Jane Whitehill. From about 1925 to 1950 they designed prize-winning quilts and influenced others to do the same. Today, Kretsinger's quilts are in the Spencer Museum of Art's collections in Lawrence, Kansas, and Whitehill's hang at the Denver Art Museum.

Hannah Haynes Headlee, the designer of Iris Garland, was acquainted with several famous Emporia quilters and often shopped for fabric in that city. The following quote was taken from Barbara Brackman's essay, "Emporia, 1925-1950: Reflections on a Community" in Kansas Quilts and Quilters, University Press of Kansas, 1993:

"Members of Hannah Headlee's family characterize her as having a 'one-track mind' about applique in the last fifteen years of her life, when she finished seven quilts and the borders for an eighth. She was known as 'the artist in the family,' teaching watercolor and china painting in Topeka.

The Iris, her masterpiece, reflects a watercolorist's love of transparent, clear colors and a sophisticated eye in the choice of complementary red-violets and yellow-greens. For the lush iris blooms she found nine shades of violet cotton and dyed the tenth herself. After her first Grandmother's Flower Garden she drew her own applique designs, inspired by Kretsinger, says her family....

Hannah Haynes was born in Topeka five years after Kansas statehood. She supported herself primarily through her art lessons and married three times. She is remembered as the first woman in Topeka to own a bicycle. In 1914 she chaperoned her niece, Pauline, to the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, where she paid their living expenses with china painting.

Unlike Emporia artists, Hannah Headlee did not enter contests; the family believes she knew exhibiting her quilts at fairs would encourage copies and she loved being an original. She did, however, judge at least one contest. In 1934 she and two others awarded Josephine Craig's Garden quilt the first prize in a national contest sponsored by Capper's.

Although Hannah Headlee did not live in Emporia, she shopped for fabric there and was acquainted with several of the Emporia quiltmakers, most importantly Rose Kretsinger, who gave her artistic ambitions new direction in fabric."

The Museum Store sells many quilt books, including Kansas Quilts and Quilters and Material Pleasures: Quilts from the Kansas Museum of History.

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