Quilt
A quilt is a multi-layered textile, traditionally composed of two or more layers of fabric or fiber. Commonly three layers are used with a filler material. These layers traditionally include a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding, and a woven back combined using the techniques of quilting. This is the process of sewing on the face of the fabric, and not just the edges, to combine the three layers together to reinforce the material. Stitching patterns can be a decorative element. A single piece of fabric can be used for the top of a quilt, but in many cases the top is created from smaller fabric pieces joined, or patchwork. The pattern and color of these pieces creates the design. Quilts may contain valuable historical information about their creators, "visualizing particular segments of history in tangible, textured ways".
In the twenty-first century, quilts are frequently displayed as non-utilitarian works of art but historically quilts were often used as bedcovers; and this use persists today.
Uses
There are many traditions regarding the uses of quilts. Quilts may be made or given to mark important life events such as marriage, the birth of a child, a family member leaving home, or graduations. Modern quilts are not always intended for use as bedding, and may be used as wall hangings, table runners, or tablecloths. Quilting techniques are often incorporated into garment design as well. Quilt shows and competitions are held locally, regionally, and nationally. There are international competitions as well, particularly in the United States, Japan, and Europe.The following list summarizes most of the reasons a person might decide to make a quilt:
- Bedding
- Decoration
- Armor
- Commemoration
- Education
- Campaigning
- Documenting events / social history, etc.
- Artistic expression
- Gift
- Fundraiser
Traditions
File:MIDSUMMER EVENING QUILTING BEE IN CENTRAL PARK, SPONSORED BY THE NEW YORK PARKS ADMINISTRATION DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL... - NARA - 551676.jpg|thumb|Quilting bee in Central Park, 1973
Quilting bees were common communal activities involving all the women and girls in a family or in a larger community. There are also many historical examples of men participating in these quilting traditions. The tops were prepared in advance, and a quilting bee was arranged, during which the actual quilting was completed by multiple people. Quilting frames were often used to stretch the quilt layers and maintain even tension to produce high-quality quilting stitches and to allow many individual quilters to work on a single quilt at one time. Quilting bees were important social events in many communities, and were typically held between periods of high demand for farm labor. Quilts were frequently made to commemorate major life events, such as marriages.
Quilts were often made for other events as well, such as graduations, or when individuals left their homes for other communities. One example of this is the quilts made as farewell gifts for pastors; some of these gifts were subscription quilts. For a subscription quilt, community members would pay to have their names embroidered on the quilt top, and the proceeds would be given to the departing minister. Sometimes the quilts were auctioned off to raise additional money, and the quilt might be donated back to the minister by the winner. A logical extension of this tradition led to quilts being made to raise money for other community projects, such as recovery from a flood or natural disaster, and later, for fundraising for war. Subscription quilts were made for all of America's wars. In a new tradition, quilt makers across the United States have been making quilts for wounded veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
There are many American traditions regarding the number of quilts a young woman was expected to have made prior to her wedding for the establishment of her new home. Given the demands on a new wife, and the learning curve in her new role, it was prudent to provide her some reserve time with quilts already completed. Specific wedding quilts continue to be made today. Wedding ring quilts, which have a patchwork design of interlocking rings, have been made since the 1930s. White wholecloth quilts with high-quality, elaborate quilting, and often trapunto decorations as well, are also traditional for weddings. A superstition existed that it was bad luck to incorporate heart motifs in a wedding quilt, so tulip motifs were often used to symbolize love in wedding quilts.
The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans holds a 19th-century exemplar of a "crazy quilt" "that was made by the Jewish Ladies’ Sewing Club of Canton, Miss., in 1885 to be raffled off to help fund the building of a synagogue there". The Museum's director, Kenneth Hoffman, says that this quilt involves "lots of little pieces that come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts, it’s crazy but it’s beautiful, it has a social aspect of ladies sitting together sewing, it has a religious aspect."
William Rush Dunton, psychiatrist, collector, and scholar of American quilts incorporated quilting as part of his occupational therapy treatment. "Dr Dunton, the founder of the American Occupational Therapy Association, encouraged his patients to pursue quilting as a curative activity/therapeutic diversion...."
The National Quilt Museum is in Paducah, Kentucky, in the Southern United States. It hosts QuiltWeek, an annual competition and celebration of that attracts artists and hobbyists from the world of quilting. QuiltWeek has been celebrated in a short documentary by Olivia Loomis Merrion called Quilt Fever. It explores what quilting means to its practitioners along with what it means to Paducah, which has earned the nickname "Quilt City, USA".
Among the many television programs as well as YouTube channels devoted to quilting, Love of Quilting, which originates in a magazine of the same name, stands out for being aired on PBS.