The Actual Cat & Mouse Quilt

An earlier blog post discussed a quilt made by Sophia (Weber) Haase that is housed in the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the University of Michigan.

The image of the quilt, like any image, can't just be used in whatever fashion I want. I can use it in my personal collection and in my own private research. But the public use of images that I did not create needs to recognize the rights of the original creator of those images and, in this case, the repository holding the quilt that was photographed. It is not enough just to indicate where the original was located--if I'm going to "publish" a picture I did not take that is not in the public domain, I need permission. I emailed the Center and received permission to use the image in a blog post.

So, with permission, here's an image of the quilt.

"Variation of Cats and Mice with Sawtooth Border," made by Sophia  (Weber)  Haase, late 19th century, in the collection of The State University of Michigan Museum; digital image, The Quilt Index, (http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1E-3D-558), obtained 11 February 2013. Image used with permission of the Great Lake Quit Center

I'm not a quilter, nor am I an artist, so the "cats and mouse" is lost on me. I can see the sawtooth border though.

It's a wonderful item to stumble across. And it makes the point that family items can easily be housed in unexpected places a distance from where the family or creator of the item actually lived. Sophia spent much of her life near Niota, Illinois--her daughter actually donated the quilt. And, as we've been stressing, it's important to obtain permission from the creators of photographs and the holders of archival material before publishing them--even in a blog post. Copyright matters.

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For those who stumble on to this page, Sophia (Weber) Haase was the wife of Herman Haase. He was a brother to Franciska (Bieger) Trautvetter (1851-1888) my great-great-grandmother.
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