The history of quilts

A silk coverlet with the year 1718 and the initials "E.H" in a block in the middle is the oldest dated patchwork in Britain. It is pieced over papers, and the papers are still in it; its motifs are people, flowers, hearts, cats, a lion and a unicorn. Who E.H was, nobody knows. The Quilters' Guild bought it at auction in 2000.

The great quilt of the time has a centre with frames round it. The Quilters' Guild calls the frames very typical of British patchwork, and Barbara Brackman dates the American medallions to about 1780–1810. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a cover marked "Sarah + Wyatt 1801" with four windmills in the middle. See Medallion with geese.

Anna Ruggles sews the oldest dated hexagon quilt known in 1796, and a cover "The outside by Mrs Cockrell 1797" already has the rosettes of Grandmother's Flower Garden. The technique is British; in America Eliza Leslie prints the pattern in 1831.

In America quilts move from medallion to blocks. The museum in Lincoln writes that the change came in the 1820s and 30s, and that the earliest block quilts often have pieced blocks alternating with plain ones, set on point. In Brackman's count four in five dated quilts of the 1840s are made of blocks. Among the first are Orange Peel and Sawtooth Star.

Album quilts, each block sewn and often signed by its giver, begin in the Delaware Valley around 1842, and about 400 are known from the country round Baltimore from 1842–1858. Sashing between the blocks is known from a painting of 1813 and becomes common from the 1830s.

Elias Howe patents his sewing machine in 1846, and Singer's machine for the home comes in 1859. Some quilts of the 1800s are machine quilted, and some machines came with a quilting attachment, but most quilted by hand far into the 1900s. See Meander and quilting in the seams.

Log cabin quilts are named at the Ohio state fair in 1863, and the block becomes one of the best loved, very popular 1870–1910. The log cabin was Abraham Lincoln's image in the 1860 campaign, but Barbara Brackman sees the name as a coincidence. See Log Cabin and the settings Log Cabin, Barn Raising and Log Cabin, Straight Furrows.

The crazy quilt of irregular silk pieces with embroidery over every seam appears in the USA and Britain in the 1880s. Magazines print directions from 1882, and in 1887 Godey's Lady's Book calls it the most childish work done with the needle. Historians link the craze to the Japanese pavilion at the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876, and Patricia Cox Crews points out that silk had become cheap. Who sewed the first one, nobody knows.

The Ladies' Art Company is founded in St. Louis in 1889 by Henry and Emma Brockstedt and sells quilt patterns by mail. The 1898 edition has 420 patterns, and Cuesta Benberry calls the catalogue the first large collection of quilt patterns in print. Here are names like Shoo Fly, Orange Peel and Evening Star, our Sawtooth Star.

Marie Webster publishes Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them with a long list of quilt names. The list is one of the best sources for when a name existed, and the book has a picture of a blue and white Jacob's Ladder.

The Kansas City Star prints over 1,000 quilt patterns from 1928 to 1961, the first three years drawn by Ruby Short McKim, who publishes One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns in 1931. From 1933 Loretta Leitner Rising writes as "Nancy Cabot" in the Chicago Tribune. In the Depression it is the time of Dresden Plate and Grandmother's Flower Garden.

The mail-order firm Sears holds a quilt contest for the Chicago World's Fair with $7,500 in prizes and receives about 25,000 quilts. The winner, a star entered by Margaret Rogers Caden of Lexington, was given to Eleanor Roosevelt and is lost today. By all accounts Caden did not sew it herself; in Lexington it is told that Mattie Clark Black sewed the top.

The exhibition "Abstract Design in American Quilts" at the Whitney Museum in New York shows 61 old quilts hung like paintings, chosen by Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof. The New York Times calls it "a stunning revelation", and it later travels to Europe and Japan. Among the quilts is a Tumbling Blocks.

Quilting flourishes again with the nostalgia before the USA's bicentennial in 1976 and the women's movement's interest in old quilts. Life magazine covers the trend in 1972, and a great bicentennial contest receives 9,954 quilts; Jinny Beyer's medallion wins. By the 1980s a whole industry has grown up round quilters.

Yoshio Okada, who founded OLFA, makes the world's first rotary cutter in 1979, at first for dressmakers, but quilters take it up. With a ruler and a rotary cutter strips are cut fast, and Barbara Johannah has already written on strip piecing in Quick Quilting (1976). It makes quilts like Rail Fence and Trip Around the World weekend projects. See also Arcs from corner to corner.

The Kentucky Quilt Project begins in 1981 as the first survey of a whole state's quilts, and the movement grows to 56 projects with more than 165,000 quilts. In 2003 the Quilt Index goes online, so the records can be seen by all.

Caryl Bryer Fallert's machine-quilted "Corona II: Solar Eclipse" wins Best of Show in Paducah, the first time a machine-quilted quilt is in the running. See Meander and quilting in the seams.

The exhibition "The Quilts of Gee's Bend", over 60 quilts from 1930–2000 by 42 women of Gee's Bend in Alabama, opens in Houston and comes to the Whitney Museum in New York; the New York Times calls them some of the most miraculous works of art America has produced. The exhibition travels until 2008.

Alissa Haight Carlton and Latifah Saafir start the Modern Quilt Guild in Los Angeles in October 2009. The first QuiltCon in Austin in 2013 has over 6,000 visitors, and by 2017 the guild has about 12,000 members. Simple shapes and straight lines are its mark; see Lines and crosshatch and Color by Number.