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Patchwork Quilt of Three Types

January 2, 1936
Detroit News Quilt History Project; Michigan State University Museum; Susan Salser
Detroit, Michigan, United States
An article on quilt history excerpted from Carrie Hall's "The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt."
Patchwork Quilt of Three Types
Only Art Women Can Claim for Selves, Author Says


Quilting bees, that were social events to their grandmothers, have become a social diversion to American women in the past few years. The depression that limited more costly pasttimes is believed by Carrie A. Hall, the author of "The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America," to have brought back needlework, "the only art which women could claim as their own."

She noted that the title, "Patchwork" included three different types of quilts: the pieced quilt, showing the pieced patch set together in various ways, that was the type of nearly all quilts before 1750; the appliqued, patched or "laid-on" quilt, usually of floral design, that came into the mode about the middle of the eighteenth century and reached its highest vogue about 1850, and the quilted counterpane, usually white, where the decoration has been obtained by means of padded or corded quilting in elaborate design.

After making several quilts, she decided to collect patterns, and her 1,000 patterns will soon be added to the Theyer Museum of Art of the University of Kansas. These patterns of the colonial and frontier women reveal, she says, the influence of racial backgrounds, religion, environment and American history on these women, both in the names and designs.

"The trek westward," she says, "was welcomed by most of the women, as it afforded them an opportunity to exchange quilt patterns with those from other sections of the country. Thus the original colonial patterns mingled with the Dutch patterns and those from the southern plantations."

Dividends of a national organization of 11,000 building and loan institutions for the second half of 1935 aggregate $130,000,000.

Courtesy of The Detroit News Archives.

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