Vintage fabric sample book finds modern home

Vintage fabric sample book finds modern home

Margo Krager discovered an unusual source for her fabric retail/consulting business — an antique fabric sample book. It is called the Dargate book and it all started with a surprising phone call in 1997.

Krager is a textile historian and owner of ReproductionFabrics.com, an online fabric retailer. In addition to providing reproductions of period fabrics to costumers and quilters; she also works with Windam Fabrics to bring reproduction fabrics to the marketplace. Many reproduction designs are based on fabrics found in old quilts and garments at museums or private collections. For Krager, that changed with finding the Dargate Book.

She calls it the Dargate Book because of the way she acquired it. One busy Monday morning, she received a phone call from Dan Zibco, a plastics manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio, that struck at the very center of her passion for reproduction fabrics. “Would she be interested in buying a book of old fabric samples?”

Zibco had purchased an auction lot of antique furniture from the Dargate Auction House in Pittsburgh. Buried in the lot of goods was a slipcase containing a fabric sample book. Not interested in antique books (or fabric), Zibco consigned it to an antique book dealer to no avail. Anxious to recoup some of his investment in the auction lot, he also searched the Internet for a possible buyer and found Krager.

A book dealer who had looked at the piece dated it to the early 1800s, but the slip case had been added later.

The ledger-sized book contained more than 2,100 vintage, cotton fabric swatches from almost 175 years ago. http://www.texflagsample.com/en/About.aspx