Alice Brooks, Darn Her

Me and the people at Electric Quilt have been working on re-issuing my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns and the digital version BlockBase in new editions later this year so I've recently been adding patterns I missed in the first indexes.

I wrote a bit about the Laura Wheeler/Alice Brooks designs of the 1930s  in the Kansas City Star Quilts Sampler book that came out last year and I thought I'd seen them all.


Link to a preview:
https://books.google.com/books?id=hmx8DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=kansas+city+star+quilts+sampler&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXh6Hj3Y3nAhXJQc0KHUugDmMQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=snippet&q=wheeler&f=false


Merikay Waldvogel conducted a study center on an important newspaper pattern group for the AQSG meeting last October. She has been telling me I missed a lot of Alice Brooks/Laura Wheeler designs. I was aghast to find she is right.

The problem is that patterns under the Alice Brooks byline were syndicated to fewer papers than the Laura Wheeler designs. I didn't see them in indexing nearby newspapers; I didn't find any in scrapbooks I came across; they were probably printed in fewer numbers and thus fewer survive.

Alice Brooks was just one name used by a New York needlework syndicate from King Features known by many names:
Reader Mail
Needlecraft Service
Household Arts
Old Chelsea Station (this is what the pattern collectors of the 1960s & '70s called it because their office was across the street from this post office branch in Manhattan)


By Lines:
Alice Brooks
Laura Wheeler
Anne Adams
Carol Curtis
Marian Martin (more clothing than quilts)
Mary Cullen


Merikay told me to subscribe to Newspapers.com to find more Brooks designs so I did and have spent too many leisure hours scrolling through papers looking at "Alice Brooks Quilt Pattern" hits. I have come up with many that were not indexed.