Quilting is back with a vengeance, and no wonder. Just as today’s generation prizes its photographs by preserving them in scrapbooks, they realize that an item like an heirloom quilt, lovingly pieced and stitched, is a family legacy of love worthy of being preserved and passed from generation to generation.

Early Quilts

The earliest quilts ever were made into underwear! Knights wore quilted fabric beneath their coats of armor to prevent chafing from the heavy pieces rubbing against their tender medieval skin. Soon quilts which are just layered fabric sandwiches, sewn together made their way to the bed chamber, where they were piled on the bed for warmth.

Aesthetic Quilting

As so often happens, utility gives way to decoration. Maybe the workers who were stitching the layers of fabric together got bored making long, straight lines of quilting and started making decorative, fanciful designs on their own. Or maybe a wealthy customer ordered a quilt made with decorative stitching. In any event, quilt customers came to expect a plain quilt top decorated with animals, flowers, fancy curlicues, and other designs outlined by stitching.

Patchwork Quilting

Practical craftspeople soon began making patchwork quilts out of thrift. Sewing small bits of fabric together to form a quilt-sized piece of fabric enabled people to reuse garments that were too worn out to be put on, but had areas that still had a lot of life left in them.

Thus, the quilts of the 19th and 20th centuries were practical and nostalgic. A teenage boy might have a quilt made of the shirts he wore when he was a young boy. A teenage girl admiring the quilt on her bed might remember the calico dresses she wore as a child.

Modern Quilting

As modern, machine-made quilts became commonplace, and commercially made blankets and comforters replaced homemade quilts on our beds, people realized the value of these homemade heirlooms. Antique quilts skyrocketed in value at antique stores, tag sales, and estate auctions. Modern homemakers and needlecraft enthusiasts began making quilts of their own, selecting fabrics for their color hues and their light and dark properties to make coordinated, patterned quilts. Childhood clothing still ends up in some memory quilts, but more out of design than necessity.

Social Quilting

Quilting has always been a social activity. Community and church groups still have old-fashioned “quilting bees” where quilts are spread out in frames or on tabletops, and everybody grabs a threaded needle and starts quilting and chatting.