A Stitch in Another Time

Of all the painstaking crafts practiced at home, few achieve the twin goals of practicality and artistry as well as does quilting. The art is nearly as old as the needle. Medieval knights wore quilted clothing under their chain mail, but not until the early 18th century did the English develop quilting to a level of elegant decoration. Yet it was their colonists in America who turned this knack of needlework into a way of life.

The fluffy layers of quilts were perfect guards against chilly backwoods nights. Often the bed was the most important piece of furniture in the house. To decorate it, colonial women created colorful counterpanes, developing a prideful home industry that ensured that there would be no idle hands in the house.

Calico Folklore. Quilling's great era in America ran from 1750 to 1870, when the Industrial Revolution put an end to the need for home manufacture. The Hanoverian kings of England had placed strict embargoes and taxes on the use of fine fabrics, such as cotton prints from Calcutta, in the colonies. So women hoarded snippets and swatches left over from dressmaking for the piecework of quilts. By the Victorian era, odd batches of brocade, chintzes and calicoes were patched into crazy quilts, more a tour de force in stitchery than in pattern. As shown in an exhibit of historic counterpanes at New Jersey's Newark Museum (see opposite page), the very nature of quilting, whether applique or piecework, required fancy sewing, such as feather, catch, cross-and kensington stitching, that few seamstresses know today.

Each with its own formal geometry, patterns proliferated with a folkloric poetry all their own: Triple Irish Chain, Windmill, Wild-Goose Chase, Princess Feather, the Drunkard's Path. Some drew from the Bible, such as Rose of Sharon, Star of Bethlehem, or Jacob's Ladder. Others were celebrations of American history: Whig's Defeat, Eagles and Stars, and red, white and blue flag patterns. Others incorporated Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs or laurel leaves, in recognition of Napoleon's neoclassic symbol of glory. Superstitious quilt makers often spoiled the symmetry deliberately in order not to imitate God's perfection and thus tempt divine wrath.

Nimble Thimbles. Rarely was there a bride without a dozen quilts packed in her hope chest. Before her wedding, her friends would gather in a quilting bee to make a friendship-album quilt in which each did a special, signed design. The art was not reserved completely for the distaff; one Charles Pratt of Philadelphia made 33 Biblical picture quilts, each composed of 30,000 half-inch squares. Still, bees buzzed mainly with the gossip of busy women clustered around the quilting frame, darting their threads to their chatter.

Store-bought bedspreads changed that way of life. The durable coverlets remain as records of folk art in America, quaint but serious documents of the attitudes of a growing nation. Tucked away in the rural U.S. (as well as among urban hobbyists) nimble-thimbled women who follow historic patterns still exist, but the qualities that make a good quilter are hard to come by in modern times. Explains one mistress of the art: "It demands steady nerves, a pleasant temperament, equal dexterity with either hand, an inborn sense of line and form, Job's patience and time galore."

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