You are here: Home > Products > BlockBase > About Barbara Brackman
About Barbara Brackman
BlockBase softwareCode: A-BBW00
"What's the name of that block?" Barbara Brackman, the world's authority on quilt patterns, answers: "Today, thirty years after I began indexing patterns ... I now realize that not every pattern has a name, that there is no correct name for any design, and that some of the names we take for granted as authentic nineteenth-century folklore actually have relatively short histories. Names so familiar to us, standards like Mariner's Compass, Flower Garden, and Lone Star, seem to have been unknown to nineteenth century quilters." Barbara Brackman is the researcher who found all the patterns now in BlockBase. She is a warm and witty quilt historian, author and pattern designer from Lawrence, Kansas. She's known for her humorous lectures, her expertise on quilt dating (she's served as consultant to many major state quilt research projects) as well as her books. For many years she was a contributing editor for Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. She was selected to be inducted into The Quilter's Hall of Fame in 2001.
Throughout the 1970's Barbara self-published the quilt patterns she'd found, releasing eight separate volumes stuffed with quilt blocks. These books formed her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. (These early encyclopedia volumes are now collector's items. Snap them up if you find them!) In 1993 her wonderful encyclopedia was republished by the American Quilter's Society in one 550-page volume. Definitely not a bedside book!
Barbara told us she knew (even before PC's were invented) that her research would one day be computerized. Here is the story Barbara told us: I grew up with computers. My father, Benjamin Brackman, began computerizing AT&T's long distance records in the 1950's. I still remember my awe and his as we looked through glass walls at a room of tempermental mainframes that hummed 24 hours a day, feeding on punched cards and reels of tape in humidity controlled, dust-free conditions. His business card read Systems Analyst, a term I never understood until after my mother died and he ran the house using his office skills, planning dinner on a flow chart so the baked potatoes and the steaks would be ready at the same time. In 1969 I bought a pack of 100 index cards so I could make sketches of my favorite quilt patterns. As soon as I began drawing four patch quilt blocks on index cards, I realized that I was writing a program for a computer that had yet to be invented. Someday, I knew because my father had told me, computers would be smaller, cheaper, commonplace and less fussy. Someday computers might even generate pictures. Barbara's search is ongoing. She is still collecting block patterns, unusual quilt tops, and other quilt and non-quilt tidbits. Barbara's other books include:
|
Watch a demo video!
Her
best-known book may be the 
We, at The Electric Quilt Company, admired Barbara's great research feat, and asked her to collaborate with us to produce