Way back when she was a Wood County 4-H member, Janice Frisch decided she wanted most of
all to do a quilting project.She was dismayed to discover 4-H had no such project. Sewing coats,
promdresses and pajamas, yes; food, animals, photography, first aid,furniture-making and a host of other
projects, sure; but not quilting.“So I did a create-your-own project on quilting – twice,”
Frischrecalled. A decade and a half later, 4-H now offers a quilting projectthat anyone can take.Frisch
didn’t know it back then, when she was serving as president ofthe Bowling Green-Portage based Four Leaf
Clover Kids, volunteering as a4-H Camp counselor and on the Food, Fashion and Family Board, but
thoseearly 4-H experiences have formed the cornerstone of her emergingcareer.It’s one that has taken the
Bowling Green native abroad and gained her international recognition while still in her 20s.The
newly-minted Dr. Frisch received a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University earlier this month.In early
October she traveled to York, England, to give a majorpresentation on her dissertation work on the tie
between U.S. andBritish quilting styles.“It basically looks at British-English-Welsh-Irish quilts from
the 1700sand early 1800s and their influence on early American quilting.”She was invited to give her
presentation to the British Quilt StudiesGroup, the research subset of the Quilters’ Guild of the
British Isles,along with Dorothy Osler, an Englishwoman deemed one of the leadingexperts in British
quilt history.Both Frisch’s and Osler’s papers are being published in the journal of the British Quilt
Studies Group.“I’ve been quilting since junior high,” said Frisch, when she learnedfrom Dr. Carol Hicks.
A 2003 graduate of Bowling Green High School, shealso did a research project on quilters in the area,
including AnneDonaldson and Bess Wood, as part of the American Studies course.As an Ohio University
undergraduate, “I stumbled into the Dairy BarnCultural Arts Center which hosted the biannual
international art quiltshow called Quilt National.”She helped the show’s director, got interested in
museum work, and tookan art history class at the Kennedy Museum of Art, which is OU’s artmuseum.“That
museum has a fantastic collection of Native American textiles andjewelry from the southwest” which
introduced her to Navajo weaving. “Thecurator there pointed out they had a number of really
spectacularNavajo weavings from the 1880s that had block styling” – also seen inearly British and U.S.
quilts.That got Frisch wondering about “the way designs crossed mediums andcultures. I wrote my
undergraduate thesis on the connection betweenthese Navajo weavings and the American quilting tradition”
and did arelated exhibition at the Kennedy museum.“For my master’s I decided to look at a modern
phenomenon in the U.S. -T-shirt quilting” which Frisch considers an under-appreciated art form.“They can
be very elegant, very well laid out and no other country isdoing them as of yet.”Frisch was surprised to
learn that “everybody disagreed on how uniquelyAmerican these block designs were – and on the correct
dates” for whensuch quilts first appeared. Guesstimates ranged all the way from thelate 1700s to the
1860s. Still more shocking, “I discovered there wasnothing written on this.”Frisch set out to fill the
void.“Sociologically, quilting comes down the social stratum in the British.It started out as a pastime
of the upper classes,” who used a techniquecalled mosaic patchwork.“They would draw patterns, cut them
out of paper; they can be very, verycomplicated. This was not a bed quilt, but rather tapestries.
Peopleprobably did not sleep under them because once they were put togetherthe paper was left inside.
Paper was very expensive then.”At first, there were two separate arts in Britain – professional quilting
and patchwork – “and it was men who did it.“The two arts came together in the late 1690s. That’s when it
became thepurview of upper- and upper-middle-class women” and quilting began tobe done inside the
home.The real democratization of quilting came in the late 1700s when cottonfirst became widely
available in the United Kingdom, replacing costlysilk in quilting.It turns out that “blocks you’ll find
in 1700s British quilts are theblocks you’ll find most commonly in quilts we think of as American –
thehalf triangle, four patch, nine patch, hourglass/bowtie and two formsof eight-pointed star, one kind
of related to the Ohio star pattern.”Frisch proved this grid-based design element leaped the “Pond” at
theturn of the century and “started showing up in abundance in the UnitedStates between 1800 and
1820.”Rapid experimentation meant that “by 1840 American quilts are looking very different from their
British predecessors.”Frisch has done in-person research on 140 early quilts at ColonialWilliamsburg in
Virginia, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and during afive-week trip to the United Kingdom in 2010.
The marathon journeyincluded seven different museums in Ulster, Belfast and Omagh, NorthernIreland;
Cardiff, Wales; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; theBeamish Museum in northern England, and
York.She’s eager to do further research in Holland and France, both of whichinfluenced early British
quilts, and ultimately “I’d love to work as amuseum curator, preferably in Europe somewhere, for a
little while.”