The colour purple in older quilts

One morning I was sitting on the floor in my quilting room, sharing Maddie's mattress, while I was having my morning tea.  I am sitting there musing about everything and nothing in particular, when I look over at the diamond hexagon quilt that I finished removing the stitches on.  The quilt is sitting there nicely just waiting to start quilting again.

That is when I noticed there are a lot of purple hexagons.  There are a lot of many different colours too, but I can't say that I noticed, just how many, purple hexagons there are.  For the most part, each diamond has at least one purple hexagon.

Purple is a very common colour in older quilts.  Mostly I see a darker blue lavender purple like the background of the hexagon above and the one below.

There are some that are a bit lighter like this one below.  I've noticed too, that beside a purple you will usually see a yellow, like all the pictures in this post.

This diamond had both a dark purple on white background and a deep dark purple. 

These were only small scraps of purple added to a quilt, but in order to have the scraps, one would have purchased the material to make something.  This quilt was like many others, made with left over bits and pieces.  I have found, that in almost all the older quilts that I have seen, there is some purple.

I've seen many quilts, mostly made around the 30-40s, that use lavender purple as a main colour and some of them are put together with soft lemon yellow, like the quilt below.  This is traditionally what you would find when looking at older quilts, as well as the usual blue and pinks.

These last three pictures of quilts I found on google images when I searched Dresden plate quilts.  Each one of them is completely different from the other.  For a Dresden plate quilt I have found that most are appliquéd to a white foundation and most use a solid colour for the centre circle.

I guess the reason the colour purple stood out to me that day, was because I was also looking at the Dresden plate quilt I am finishing off for my cousin.  It was on the design wall next to me.

The Dresden plate quilt is done now, all folded up waiting it's turn to be quilted.  I was looking up some images of Dresden plate quilts to get some ideas on how to do the quilting.  When it comes to the quilting, there is not much variety.  We will just have to see what I come up with....