Quilting designs

The Victoria and Albert Museum has quilted silk petticoats from the 1700s, one from 1740–1770 quilted in ¾-inch diamonds and one from 1730–1750 with a border against a ground of diagonal lines, and The Quilters' Guild a silk quilt from the 1700s with diamonds as filling. Barbara Brackman calls parallel lines the most common hand quilting for filling and all-over quilting, often doubled or tripled; double and triple lines, in grids or on the diagonal, are "very 19th century". In the South most plain-coloured quilts are quilted in straight lines.

In the modern quilt movement, whose Modern Quilt Guild was founded in 2009 by Alissa Haight Carlton and Latifah Saafir, simple lines have come back by machine. Jacquie Gering, one of the movement's leading quilters, wrote the book Walk (2016) on quilting with a walking foot.

QuiltCrafter's Lines can be turned to any angle, and Grid lays lines both ways; turned 45° it becomes diamonds, the classic crosshatch. Sew all the lines one way first, then the other, with a walking foot.

Joseph Hedley, called "Joe the Quilter", of Warden in Northumberland was a tailor and a professional quilter. The Bowes Museum has a white quilt he quilted with flowers, feathers and fans, inscribed "This was done by Old Joe the quilter in 1824"; he was murdered in January 1826, and according to Northumberland Archives his work was known in England, Ireland, Scotland and America.

In the North of England marking the designs, "stamping", became a trade, although it was done by hand from brown-paper templates. Elizabeth Sanderson of Allenheads (1861–1933) had apprentices and gave her name to the Sanderson Star, and the North Country feather is typical of the country round Durham: the Victoria and Albert Museum has a quilt in red thread of 1932 by Nina Pirt of County Durham. In Wales a Mrs Daymond of Tonna quilted in the 1930s with a feather after the Prince of Wales's plume, and in America the museum in Lincoln has a medallion from 1820–1840 with a stuffed feather.

QuiltCrafter has two kinds: Square Feather lays feather wreaths on a grid of four spacings, and Feather frames lays the feathers in frames round the middle. Each feather is drops that stop at the one before, sewn free motion.

Clamshells are one of the old filling designs of British wholecloth quilting. The Quilters' Guild has a cream silk quilt from the 1700s whose borders are filled with lines and clamshells, and a yellow North Country quilt from 1920–1939 with clamshells, a small cable and tulips. A Welsh quilt from about 1850–1870, now in Tasmania, is quilted in Welsh patterns: clamshells, the Welsh pear and spirals.

The designs were marked from templates. The Victoria and Albert Museum has 86 templates of brown paper and card from Durham from 1900–1932, among them shells and feathers. Clamshells can also be pieced; The Quilters' Guild has a top of that kind from 1939–1959 with the papers still in at the edge.

QuiltCrafter's Clamshells lays the arcs on a grid from the middle, row by row. The design is calm and good as a filling behind a motif or over a whole quilt, sewn free motion or with a template.

Barbara Brackman calls fans very popular in the South from the late 1800s into the 1900s, and in her collection of about 1,000 dated quilts 16 have fan quilting, 13 of them from after 1900. The museum in Lincoln names "fan" or "elbow quilting" as a mark of Southern quilts: the arcs come from the quilter's elbow, which was the centre.

Quilters marked from the edge and worked inward: Beck Kirby of Toccoa, Georgia, put her elbow on the quilt's edge and struck the arc in chalk, and Ila Patton of Virginia tied the chalk to a string. Where the arcs from each side did not meet, a strip ran down the middle, which quilters called the backbone or "hog's back". The forerunner may be the shell designs Marie Webster showed in 1915, and fans are found in Britain too: Joseph Hedley's quilt of 1824 is quilted with flowers, feathers and fans.

QuiltCrafter's Fans lays the arcs out from the middle, each arc stopping at the fans before it, so the rows lie like roof tiles. The spacing is the arcs' spacing; sewn free motion or on a longarm as "edge to edge".

Echo quilting is the hallmark of Hawaiian quilts. In Hawaiian it is kuiki lau, "quilting that follows the design", and Pukui and Elbert's dictionary has names for other ways of quilting, such as kuiki lala on the diagonal. The first sewing circle was held on the ship Thaddeus on 3 April 1820, where the missionaries' wives and Hawaiian women sewed calico patchwork; the large appliqués, cut from a folded piece of cloth, came about the 1870s according to the museum in Lincoln.

The master quilter Meali'i Kalama, who received the USA's national folk art award in 1985, described the rows half an inch apart as a ripple out from the design. The Bishop Museum likens the pattern to the imprint of the patterned beater that beat kapa, the Hawaiian bark cloth, and Hawaiian Mission Houses has a bird of paradise quilt from the 1920s by Alice Mahelona with echo quilting in white thread.

QuiltCrafter's Echo is the simple version: one line a little inside each piece, along the seams, also called outline quilting. The edge of the presser foot follows the seam, so it is easy to sew straight; more lines inward give the ripple from Hawaii.

Barbara Johannah tells in a 2001 interview for Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories that she came up with and published continuous curve quilting in the book Continuous Curve Quilting in 1980, as the machine's answer to hand quilting; the book came out with C&T in 1987. The line runs in arcs from corner to corner through a grid of squares without stopping.

The shape is the same as the patchwork block Orange Peel, which Barbara Brackman knows from quilts in fabrics of about 1800–1830. When it also became a quilting design, we have not found.

QuiltCrafter's Orange Peel lays the arcs in a grid over the whole quilt, so they make pointed ovals; Arc flowers use a grid at twice the spacing, so four arcs meet in a flower. Both are sewn with a walking foot or free motion.

Elias Howe got his American patent for the sewing machine in 1846, and Singer's machine for the home came in 1859. The museum in Lincoln writes that some quilts from the middle and end of the 1800s are machine quilted, and that some early machines came with a quilting attachment; the museum has a hexagon quilt from 1860–1880 and a President's Wreath from about 1870–1880 quilted by machine. But most quilted by hand right up to the late 1900s.

Stippling first meant something else: in hand-sewn stuffed work (trapunto) it was small stitches close together in the background, so it lay flat and the stuffed motifs stood out, the Illinois State Museum writes. Harriet Hargrave's book Heirloom Machine Quilting (1987, new editions 1990, 1995 and 2004) was about machine quilting fit to hand down, and in 1989 Caryl Bryer Fallert's machine-quilted "Corona II: Solar Eclipse" won Best of Show in Paducah, the first time a machine-quilted quilt was in the running. Today it is in the National Quilt Museum.

QuiltCrafter's Meander is one wandering line over the whole quilt that never crosses itself, and Loops the same with small loops. They are sewn free motion with the feed dogs lowered, or on a longarm machine.

In the seams ("stitch in the ditch") is sewn on the low side of the seam, where the seam allowance does not lie, so the stitches all but vanish and no marking is needed. Round the blocks does the same only round the blocks, the sashing and the borders.