A Guest Blogger – Barbara Brackman!

Butternut & Blue by Betty Weber McNeill

The quilts above and below are from a Kansas City Star Quilts book I wrote called Borderland in Butternut and Blue. We used navy blue and yellow ochre to symbolize the Confederacy and the Union in the Civil War.

Butternut & Blue (detail) by D. June Ford

We tend to think of Civil War colors as “the blue and the gray,” but many Southern soldiers had no access to official Confederate uniforms and wore their everyday clothing made of home-dyed butternut.

Two formal portraits of Confederate soldiers in uniform from the Library of Congress.

Missouri refugees in rags. Southerners were insulted as “Butternuts” because of their homemade clothing.

Walnut hulls were a source of butternut dye. The backing of this mid-19th-century quilt looks to have been dyed butternut.

Butternut dye from walnut trees produces shades of brown up to a muted yellow. We recall its usefulness for workclothes in today’s Carharrt coveralls that are dyed the same shade (undoubtedly with a modern dye).

Today's workclothes. Today’s workclothes.

Borderland in Butternut and Blue

My book features a sampler quilt with some stand-along projects. Click here.

Now is a good time to make the blocks because I’ve used the shades of blue and yellow in my Moda collection Civil War Homefront. It’s in quilt shops now.

Swatches from Civil War Homefront in Sassafras Tan, Sorghum Brown and Ironclad Navy