temperance quilt – Carrie Nation and her fabulous hatchet

Ladies, get your hatchets ready!

Do you remember who Carrie Nation, excuse me, Carrie A. Nation was? I can refresh your memory. She was the woman who famously took her hatchet into bars to smash up all the bottles full of demon rum. You’ve probably seen her depicted in old political cartoons looking both crazy and curmudgeonly. She was a woman doing outlandish things for her cause.

The general public may have thought that she was nuts, but she was able to create a whole symbol for herself and the temperance movement. Hello hatchet. Hello branding. If you were a temperance supporter, you could get your very own hatchet pin or little “Carry A Nation” hatchet. The Grandmother’s Choice blog (very cool idea) has a good post with more about Carrie Nation and instructions for the Carrie Nation quilt block.

PS – Carrie Nation has a quilt block named after her.

And that’s what I used as the base for this quilt. I took the traditional Carrie Nation block and laid it out in a zig-zag and pushed it toward the side edge of the quilt. I think the original idea of the block was to depict all the little pieces of the bottles flying (or maybe I am making that up), but my layout is meant to pick up the slashing of the hatchet.

I really like it, as a quilt. I used an old white sheet as the back, so it all very light and soft and snuggly. In the photos taken by the field, the color are washed out by the beautiful golden sunlight. The colors are correct in the other ones.

This is my second quilt in a modern exploration of temperance movement quilts. You can read about the first one, “T” is for Tipsy here.