Now is the Best Time to Make a Quilt
We are celebrating 25 years of Love of Quilting Magazine and are taking a look back at this timeless article written by Marianne Fons all about how now is the best time to make a quilt. We hope you enjoy it!
A common notion is that “everything was better in the old days.” Frequently, when chatting with a non-quilter, if I reveal we work our patchwork magic mostly by machine these days, my listener’s eyes become misty. He, or she—usually a person who has not held a needle or wound a bobbin, ever—becomes nostalgic. Spoken or not, the sentiment that “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to” hangs in the air.
Most quilty people dedicate more time to playing with fabric and actually making quilts than studying the history of quilt making. (Of this, I can only approve: buy fabric! It keeps our industry thriving!) However, we who ply the needle might also operate under the mistaken notion that quilters of yesteryear (the Colonists maybe?) somehow had it better than we do, especially when we look at an antique Mariners Compass so fabulous it seems untouched by human hands.
The truth is, right now is the best time in American history to be making quilts. To prove my point, let me take you on a little journey back in time.
History Worth Knowing
Colonial days were a terrible time to quilt, unless you were rich. Beautiful, exotic chintzes, on-trend then in London and Paris, were the rage among fashionistas of the New World, too. Everyone (men and women, but only the wealthy ones) dressed in these gorgeous fabrics. Glazed chintz was de rigueur for window drapes and bed curtains as well. Printed in India, such fabrics were imported to England, then sent across the pond to the Americas, the price jacked up by every pair of hands that touched them on route. Even the rich had to cut them apart to justify the cost; clever (wealthy) needlewomen separated the birds-of-paradise, the palm trees, and the cornucopias from the whole cloth, appliquéing these motifs to cheaper, plain fabric to cover their beds and grace the windows of their homes. Only ladies of leisure married to influential men had quilts.
Once America belonged to the Americans, the next big revolution on our shores was the Industrial Revolution. Cotton growers in southern states supplied the raw material for textile mills in the north, and soon, printed cotton cloth became cheap, cheap, cheap. A yard of fabric that cost the equivalent of $5 in 1790 was only five cents by 1840. The New England mill town of Ware, Massachusetts, turned out nearly two million yards of cloth in one year, 1837.
The second quarter of the nineteenth century to around 1930 or so was a good time to make quilts. Every member of the family wore shirt weight cotton. Scraps from family sewing were cotton scraps. Yards of dress goods were yards of printed cotton, perfect for quilts. Indeed, the great flowering of American quilt making occurred during these years. Incredibly clever women, invented (without graph paper or computers) thousands of fantastic quilt blocks, naming them marvelous names like Log Cabin, Bear Paw, Cake Stand, and Churn Dash. Just about every woman, from the time she could hold a needle, could sew. The work these gals (and a few men) turned out in the decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, whether they were stitching Album blocks in Baltimore, Feathered Stars in Kansas, or Grape Baskets in California, elevated patchwork, appliqué, and quilting itself. “The Quilt” evolved from a mere bedcover into the icon of American folk art it is today.
Hold the Nostalgia
In those days though, you had to heat your iron on a wood stove—after adding wood—visit the outhouse to powder your nose and launder your lingerie on a washboard. Your morning might start with milking a cow or assisting at childbirth. You pretty much had to date and marry a boy from the community, and “family planning” didn’t exist. Also, from 1861 to 1865, our country was engaged in a bloody civil war. The years leading up to the War Between the States and then its aftermath were years of terrible emotional and financial hardship for almost everyone.
By the 1940s, the heyday of quilting was over. Cotton’s reign was usurped by synthetic fabrics. Women were to blame, but you can’t really blame them. They loved dress goods that didn’t wrinkle (see ironing above) or ravel. “Homemade” quilts and other sewing seemed just so . . . homey. A blanket ordered from Sears, Roebuck, and delivered by US Parcel Post was something to show off to the neighbors. Plumbing and electricity (see outhouse above) in the home were becoming standard. Life was better, but not for the American quilt.
Cotton Went Away
The popularity of synthetics from the1930s–40s through the 1970s (think leisure suits) is why when I started making quilts, it was a really terrible time. True, the run-up to the American Bicentennial of 1976 made people nostalgic about quilts. Everybody had two or three old ones in the closet, and some people thought the perfect thing to
do to commemorate the Bicentennial was make a quilt. The trouble was, hardly a scrap of 100% cotton could be found. Except for our blue jeans, most people hadn’t a cotton garment to their name.
Despite the dearth of quilt-weight cotton, a lot of women my age—I was around 25 at the time— undaunted, used what little we could scare up to make our first quilts. But there were no books on quilting, patterns for quilts, quilting classes, quilt guilds, quilt shops, or quilting conferences. We drafted patterns (we had graph paper!), made templates from cardboard cereal boxes, cut out fabric pieces with scissors, and did much of our patchwork by hand.
The American Quiltmaking Revival Begins
Luckily, the other women in the Beginning Quilting class
I requested from the ISU Home Extension Office in Winterset, Iowa—where I met Liz Porter—were not the only women in America who thought it might be fun to make a quilt. North to South, from coast to coast, interest in quilt making, which had begun in the early 1970s as part of a renewed national interest in crafts in general, was trending upward. Someone in the fabric industry noticed a surprising demand for cotton, and (hooray!) many companies began manufacturing dress-weight cottons specifically for quilts.
None of my early quilts were scrap quilts. (Scrap quilts can only be made when lots and lots and lots of fabrics are available, leftover from family garment sewing or fat quarters bought brand new). I was lucky if I could pull together seven or eight fabrics that worked together. One stinker in those days and your quilt was not a success.
When the rotary cutter became available in the 1980s, my quilt buddies and I switched from scissors in a hot minute. With that tool in our hands, quilters every bit as clever as the pattern-inventing geniuses of a century before came up with ways to make quilts faster and better: strip-piecing, quick-cutting, flippy corners, paper piecing. Sewing machine companies responded too, offering features to speed up the process so stitchers could devote more time to the creativity of design itself, make quilts faster, and start the next quilt sooner.
The Time Is Now
There has never, ever, been a better time to make quilts than right now. No matter what colors or styles of prints you favor, there are thousands to buy at a brick-and-mortar shop or an online one. Available to you are acrylic templates, special machine presser feet, ceramic marking tools, incredible die-cutting systems, and track lighting. You can belong to a quilt guild, actual or virtual. You can learn techniques from quilting books and magazines, from Public Television programs and online webinars, at a quilting conference, or on a quilters’ cruise.
But wait, there’s more! While you’re quilting, you can listen to any kind of music you like, talk on your phone with anyone, anywhere, and have a pizza delivered to your door. The bathroom and the kitchen are just steps away, whether you sew in your basement, attic, or spare room. Any quilter in America who has to throw a log on the fire is probably doing so by choice.
There are plenty of good things to say about the “good old days,” and I would agree, regarding quilts, “we don’t make ‘em like we used to.” Indeed, we make them differently, and, on balance, way better. My guess is, if we could transport a quilter from any time in the American quilt-making past to a full-service quilt shop or a national quilting event of the present, she’d be in heaven.
Originally published in Quilty Magazine Sep/Oct 2014 issue and written by Marianne Fons.
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