Pennsylvania’s Museum Extension Project (MEP), part of the WPA’s Division of Women’s and Professional Projects, provided work for women and white-collar workers. In contrast to the sewing rooms and handicraft projects for “unskilled” women, the MEP employed many educated workers, including artists, architects, and Librarians. The MEP’s mission was to develop educational resources for schools, museums, and libraries across the state.

The MEP catalog included “Patchwork Quilt Plates”—large scale screen printed quilt patterns based on historical quilts with instructions for how to assemble them.

When considered in the context of the other visual aids for education produced by the MEP, these quilt patterns—like dioramas, costume plates, and miniature replicas of historical furniture—were created and distributed as a means of teaching schoolchildren in Pennsylvania about past ways of living. Unlike most other MEP visual aids, quilt patterns were not mere illustrations of past traditions but could double as usable patterns.

In 1990, when Barbara Garrett—a member of a southeastern Pennsylvania’s Variable Star Quilters, a quilting group with a penchant for history—purchased a set of the quilt patterns at an estate sale, guild members discovered that the portfolio of quilt patterns drew heavily on another 1930s quilt resource: Colonial Revivalist Ruth Finley’s Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them (1929). Despite the MEP’s claim that the patterns were based on physical quilts, each pattern was actually drawn from a black-and white plate or diagram in Finley’s now classic book. The project manual’s essay, “History and Romance in Quilts,” was heavily plagiarized from Finley’s text.

Although a handful of full pattern sets exist in archives and a few incomplete sets have also emerged, the Variable Stars Quilters theorize that the portfolio was put together quickly with only minimal distribution.