Susannah Gorton's Quilted Petticoat
Susanna E. Gorton
Warwick, Rhode Island
1770
Rhode Island Historical Society, acc.#1982.76.2

The glazed wool petticoat shows quilting style shared by clothing and bedquilts. Similar designs are seen in eighteenth-century American wholecloth quilts with patterns such as feathers, birds and pineapples accented by a diagonal grid. Filler quilting of close diagonal lines puffs out the images, taking advantage of the reflective wool that imitates a silk satin.

 

Blue Resist
1760
Collection of Scott Fanton Museum, Danbury, Connecticut; acc.# 76:17.1

This wholecloth quilt features a large print of the type sometimes described as China blue, presumably because it looks like porcelain design. In 1761 New Yorker Mrs. John Haugan advertised that she "stamps linen china blue or deep blue, or any other colour that gentlemen and Ladies fancies. Bed sprays [spreads], womens gowns." Also called blue resist prints, these unusual designs were block printed by hand in indigoes and  are a good clue to a quilt made before 1800.^[ii]

 

Wholecloth Quilt
Maker unknown
c1780
Kingston, New York
Collection of the Michigan State University Museum acc.#2007:116.1

The quiltmaker contrasted two variations of a block-printed cotton, one with a dark ground, the other with a light ground. The print style is now called a floral trail, a style of design repeat based on stems winding across the surface. Almost a wholecloth quilt, this style of framed quilt is seen in America and Great Britain.

 

Wholecloth Quilt
Edmund Bailey (1787-1873) and Mary Bigelow Bailey (1795-1879)
c1812-1813
Connecticut
Collection of the Michigan State University Museum acc.6614.1#

Mary Bigelow quilted the date into her quilt made from a glazed wool sometimes called calimanco at the time. These reflective wools were prized for fancy quilting because the feathers, pineapples and florals showed so nicely.

 

1808 fashion plate featuring calimanco.

 

Red Copperplate
Maker unknown
Private Collection

The Connecticut Quilt Project documented this bedcover made of two different toile (pronounced twahl) fabrics. The prints were done with complex rotary presses on copperplates about a meter square.  Plate prints with fine incised lines produced greater detail than wood blocks.  Designers could render flowers and birds with biological exactness and experiment with new subject matter like portraits, landscapes and current events, as in the print at the top, featuring an American patriotic scene.  Detail in the figures and the size of the plate made color registration difficult, so technology dictated that copperplate prints be monochromatic, typically blue, brown or a pinkish red on a white background as in this quilt.

 

Applique of Cutout Chintz
Jane Gatewood
1795
Clover Lick, Pocahontas County, West Virginia
Private Collection

The letters GWT and 1795 are embroidered on this quilt, one of the few surviving American quilts with a date from the eighteenth century actually inscribed on it.  The maker used a variety of fabrics and patchwork designs with a central focus of appliquéd florals cut from chintz prints.  She also featured stars and bowknots. Her fabrics were likely imported, although there were small American workshops weaving cottons and linen "domestic cloth" like the whites. A handful of "calico printers" produced the simple small-scale prints with woodblocks. American printers might have printed some of the larger-scale florals, but the copperplate toiles were a relatively new technology confined to European mills.

 

Medallion Quilt
Maker unknown
1790-1800
Collection of the Paine House Museum

This quilt has been altered with a newer back that was then tied with knots showing on the front, a style favored by seamstresses one hundred years after it was made. Ignore the white ties to see a typical early quilt pieced of small-scale woodblock prints and a large-scale toile, a scenic two-color print made in Europe using the copperplate process. Pieced checkerboards, pieced stars and borders of deep triangles are typical of early quilts.

 

Triangular borders were popular in clothing and quilts in the early nineteenth century, as shown in this fashion plate from 1813.

 

Calimanco
Maker unknown
1775-1825
Collection of the DAR Museum acc.#6521

The quiltmaker embroidered "JSHS4J" on the reverse of this glazed wool quilt, but left us no date. The calamanco wool style is a good clue to a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century date and to an origin in New England. The glazed wools were often imported fabrics and many of these calamanco quilts have more homely backs of coarser wools. Most calamanco quilts are wholecloth style but pieced medallion and block-style patchwork quilts survive.

 

Plume with Star
Deborah Wilson
1783
Baltimore, Maryland
Collection of the DAR Museum acc.#60.56

Quiltmakers could choose either block-style or medallion-style sets, or a combination of both as Deborah Wilson did. Quite worn today, her quilt never had a great variety of color, but was stitched from colorfast indigo blue prints that have lasted for centuries with more fugitive pink prints that can only be seen now in close inspection.  Deborah used a variety of patchwork designs including stars with four points and eight points, design ideas still popular today.

 

Puss in the Corner
Anna Hixson
1799-1827
Mason County, Kentucky
Collection of the DAR acc.#59.192

Anna Hixson used a limited variety of prints, small-scale designs printed with indigo and madder dyes, the kind of prints that might have been domestically produced rather than imported.  There is no central focus here, but the repeat is the classic block-style design that creates a unified secondary pattern. This variation of what we call a nine-patch is one of the earliest patchwork designs.

 

Appliqué Medallion Quilt
Previously attributed to Abigail Adams (1744-1818)
c1825-1840
Possibly Massachusetts
Collection of the Michigan State University Museum acc.#11396CW

The central design here, as in Jane Travers Gatewood's 1795 medallion above, is appliquéd using a technique we might call Broderie Perse (Persian embroidery). Also called cut-out chintz, the technique features motifs from printed cottons rearranged on a plain piece of fabric in a new composition.

 

Medallion
Elizabeth Yoakum Harness and Martha Harness Darst
Early 19^th century
Collection of the DAR Museum acc.#2005.38

Limited color but unlimited needlework skills are evident in this embroidered, pieced and appliquéd medallion. The grapes and florals are fashioned from blue, pink and brown cottons rather than being cut directly out of chintz, an appliqué technique that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century supplanting the style-out-chintz style by mid-century. The elaborate quilting is stuffed to add another dimension to the design. Stuffed quilting in this whitework style came into fashion in the late eighteenth century as cotton thread became widely available.

 

Wholecloth
Maker unknown
1800-1849
Private Collection

Here is another early quilt featuring stuffed whitework in the quilting.

 

Strip Quilt
Maker unknown
Collection of the Varnum House acc.#Q004

A fashion for striped fabric in interior design may be responsible for the advent of the strip set quilt. This example, featuring strips of stripes alternated with a small-scale print, is attributed to the early years of that fashion.

 

Medallion
Maker unknown
1800-1810
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Collection of the DAR Museum acc.#74.290

Two patchwork strips frame a medallion center that includes a panel design featuring an urn of flowers with birds and butterflies. Smaller motifs featuring birds and florals are also printed on the central panel. The central panel and the outer border were printed in the Philadelphia workshop of John Hewson (1745 -1821 ) who was in business there from 1774 until his son took over the printworks after 1810.

 

Medallion Chintz
Unknown relative of the Ransom family
c1820
Collection of the Michigan State University Museum acc.#2001:158.13

The quiltmaker has framed an eight-sided panel printed with birds and florals. These panels were imported from England where they probably were meant for cushions and chair seats, but many quiltmakers found them quite suitable for a central focus for their medallions. John Hewson's vase with butterfly panel is the only domestically produced panel yet found.

 

Mosaic
Abigail Hunt
1807
Connecticut
Private Collection

Abigail Hunt used a pattern that became one of the most consistently popular designs in England and its former colonies. Today called Grandmother's Flower Garden, nineteenth-century quilters may have called it Mosaic, Hexagon, Job's Troubles or Honeycomb. Each scrap of fabric was basted to a paper hexagon and the edges were joined with a whip stitch, a technique considered good occupation for young seamstresses who needed to learn to sew a fine seam in the decades before the invention of the sewing machine, which came into popular use in the 1850s. The seamstress might remove the backing papers and quilt the piece as Abigail did.

 

Mosaic Star
Mary Hopkins Hayne
c1825
Private Collection

Mary Hayne added a pieced border and some simple appliqué to her mosaic patchwork but never finished out the piece with quilting, a rather typical fate in both England and America for these hexagons pieced over papers.