Quilting fast counts as aerobic exercise

https://bookswelove.net/stover-karla/

My parents were the youngest in their respective families, owned their home, and had a big basement. That meant, as various family members downsized, a lot of their I-don't-need-it-right-now items ended up in the basement. Then my parents died, followed by my brother, and that's how I inherited a signature quilt with names I can't identify.

Signature quilts, aka Autograph quilts and Album quilts have a long history.

TIMELINE:

400 BC - 300 BC:  people began making what was known as Gallnut Ink out of Oak Gallnuts (Oak Apples) and Iron Sulphate. 

3400 BCE: when it thought that stitching together of layers of padding and fabric together, may date back to. 

1101 - 1200: when historians think Crusaders introduced quilting in Europe.

1360: In Sicily when one of the earliest existing decorative works, the Tristan Quilt, was made.

The early 19th century was an enormously sentimental time: diaries, scrapbooks, poetry, and sketches, or photographs when they became available, abound. Then, in approximately 1839, the first indelible ink showed up in stationary stores and quilters turn their attention to signature quilts. While back home they often commemorated single events such as a marriage or birth of a child, based, as they were, on friendships and/or family, they became comforting reminders of home during the first western expansion (Massachusetts to Ohio). The women making these quilts sometimes stitched their political and religious beliefs. Baltimore album quilts have sayings, bible verses, and drawings inked on many of the blocks. 

One day in 1856, Adeline Harris, a seventeen-year-old Rhode Island girl, came up with a unique idea, make a quilt in the tumbling block pattern and incorporate hundreds of celebrity autographs. She mailed out small diamonds of white silk to various notables with an explanation of her project and a request that they sign the square and send it back to her signed. 

POSTAGE CHARGES IN 1856:

• Domestic Letter Rate (under 3,000 miles): 3 cents per half-ounce.
• Domestic Letter Rate (over 3,000 miles): 10 cents per half-ounce.
• Foreign Letter Rate (under 2,500 miles): 10 cents per half-ounce.
• Foreign Letter Rate (over 2,500 miles): 20 cents per half-ounce.

Miss Harris spent seven years collecting the 360 signatures she began incorporating in her quilt. Among those luminaries who responded and whose names are still recognized today, were Samuel Morse, Horace Greeley, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jacob Grimm, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Alexandre Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jacob Grimm, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The result was a quilt measuring 80 × 77 in and is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Approximately 80 years later, a lady named Thelma Grey did the same thing, mailing square of cotton. The 65 signatures she received, often with personal notes, included entertainers Bing Crosby, Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, World War II generals Marshall, Wainwright, Arnold, MacArthur, and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower and first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Grace Coolidge, and Edith Wilson.

Forty four autographs make up the Bi-centennial quilt. Happily putting their signatures on muslin were Elvis Presley, Bob Hope, Rose Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and Norman Rockwell and forty others.

Several years ago I decided to write a fan letter to one of my favorite Golden Age movie stars. It came back from all seven addresses I found and used. How does one even find these people anymore? I'm thinking a Kardashian quilt would be an amazing fundraiser for my garden club. 

But in the meantime, what should I do with my quilt of mystery signatures?