Embroidery with the fair's symbol
Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Quilt Contests: 1939-1940 New York World's Fair
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The year before Good Housekeeping magazine and Macy's Department Store had sponsored a contest on the Fair theme of Better Living In The World of Tomorrow.
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Family from FindaGrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/213010522/reba-g-grice
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I do not have a good copy of the magazine's announcement of the winners in their August, 1939 issue.
This is Merikay Waldvogel's. She indicates that Good Housekeeping sold patterns for these three.
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Mary Gasparik of Chicago entered her original design Road to Prosperity (at the right), on exhibit here this winter at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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The year before Good Housekeeping magazine and Macy's Department Store had sponsored a contest on the Fair theme of Better Living In The World of Tomorrow.
Reba Grice Simms (1905-1972) entered that contest
with her original design quilted by her mother Lulu Grice's
friends in Headland, Alabama. This is one of the few published
references I can find about the contest but no idea of what
Reba's original design looked like.
Original designs were required---an innovation at the time when for years contests had focused on antiques and the "oldest quilt" entered.
This is Merikay Waldvogel's. She indicates that Good Housekeeping sold patterns for these three.
Needlework designer Anne Orr wrote the article so she must have had something to do with the contest (and drawing the patterns?)
Gladys Bean Smith made a copy of the third-place winner.
Somewhere I came across this photo of a quilt
attributed to Emma Hoerner of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
She must have made her original design for that 1939 competition.
Portraits of George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt and
appliances of the era...
Transportation progress
Her inspiration may have been the many quilts made for the
1933 World's Fair in Chicago where the theme
included A Century of Progress in Transporation.