Designs by Kate Greenway for Needlepoint

A little boy and girl by Kate Greenaway for crazy

quilts based upon antique variations.

     Especially popular during the 1880s were the designs of Kate Greenaway (Catherine Greenaway -17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901). Women often incorporated needlepoint and painted stencils from Greenaways illustrated books into their crazy quilts.

      Greenaway's paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colors were printed from hand-engraved wood blocks by the firm of Edmund Evans. Through the 1880s and 1890s, her only rivals in popularity in children's book illustration were Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott.

      "Kate Greenaway" children, all of them little girls and boys too young to be put in trousers, according to the conventions of the time, were dressed in her own versions of late eighteenth century and Regency fashions: smock-frocks and skeleton suits for boys, high-waisted pinafores and dresses with mobcaps and straw bonnets for girls. The influence of children's clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758–1810) may have provided her some inspiration. Liberty of London adapted Kate Greenaway's drawings as designs for actual children's clothes. A full generation of mothers in the liberal-minded "artistic" British circles who called themselves "The Souls" and embraced the Arts and Crafts movement dressed their daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and 1890s.

Add a few little girls by Kate Greenaway

to your next crazy quilt design.