Quilting was a very popular early American pastime, first in the Midwest, where quilting circles were a common social pastime for women, and later on the Great Plains, especially from 1825 to 1875, where quilting bees, when many women gathered around a quilting frame and quilted, became important social occasions. A twenty-first-century offshoot is the barn quilt. As a heritage object with distinctive patterns, the patchwork quilt has come to be particularly associated with Canada and the United States. The lack of information about earlier quilts made of humbler fabric, is partly attributed to such quilts being "intimately connected to everyday life" of the Dutch and English settlers in the New World. Eighteenth-century patchwork "was a ladies’ leisure pursuit" in both Europe and North America, with the earliest surviving specimens from Wiltshire in 1718 and Quebec in 1726 made of silk. Though quilting has a long history, likely more than five millennia, and takes various forms in many cultures, the block-style patchwork quilt became a "distinct expression" of nineteenth-century America, evolving into a representative folk art of interest to scholars that is still produced today. Outline quilting is when the pieces of the pattern are outlined by the quilting stitches. The quilting can either outline the patchwork motifs, or be a completely independent design, for when quilting, the design may not necessarily follow the patchwork design, and the design of the quilting may play off the patchwork design. These three layers are stitched together ("quilted"), either by hand or machine. The quilt is formed of three layers: the patchwork quilt top, a layer of insulation wadding ( batting), and a layer of backing material. Heavy thread or yarn is used to tie all three layers together at points across the surface of the quilt. Another, more casual option is to "tie" the quilt. These include: trapunto (where additional batting to be sewn through is stuffed into a discrete section of the quilting), cording (where cotton cording or yarn are pulled between quilting lines that form channels), and stipple quilting (where dense, closely spaced quilting causes the batting to be more compressed than it is in adjacent areas). The raw, cut edges are folded under, and sewn onto the smaller piece of fabric below, creating a new design.Īdditional design options are provided by quilting techniques that alter the texture of the quilt. Reverse appliqué involves cutting the ground fabric, and placing another fabric beneath the opening.
Broderie perse is a related technique, where selections of printed fabric are cut out, and sewn in place to produce the effect of a custom printed cloth. The dense printed patterns were cut out, spread apart on a background of plain fabric, allowing the effect of the rare fabric to spread further. Early uses of applique in the United States included efforts to expand the effect of expensive, imported European fabrics in early America. Applique, where a piece of fabric is layered on top of the a base or "ground" fabric and then the cut edges are folded under and sewn down, is not limited to simple geometric designs. Geometric designs were the most efficient way to aggregate fabric into useful units. Patchwork blocks were initially created individually, accumulated over time, by use of scrap and salvaged material. Designs can be geometric and formal or imaginative.