Traditional Quilting - Its Story And Its Practice

TRADITIONAL QUILTING

Its Story and its Practice

By

MAVIS

FITZRANDOLPH

1 Quilt made in 1939 by Mrs. Coulthard, Weardale, with feather twist border

PREFACE

THE object of this book is to put on record as much of the traditional lore about quilting as I have been able to collect. Many old quilters have died in the last forty years or so without leaving anyone of a younger generation who will continue to use their frames; thus many threads of tradition have been broken off short and it seems worth while to pick up the ends of those which have been carried down to the present and, by weaving them together, to form a picture of this ancient and interesting craft. Much has been written about American quilts (though more about the patchwork which is usually combined with quilting in that country); little has been written about British quilting and I believe that Mrs. Hake¹ is the only writer who has previously carried out any searching enquiry, as she did in the south-west of England with unexpectedly rich results.

During the years 1920–23 a survey of rural industries was carried out in every county of England and Wales under the direction of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford, but in the volume of the published reports² dealing with Wales there is no mention of quilting, whilst in another volume it is referred to only very briefly as a home craft in the north of England, with a passing reference to the fact that quilts were sometimes made for sale. Yet at the time when that survey was made there were certainly dozens of village quilters at work for their livelihood and perhaps hundreds of quilt clubs in profitable action. They were so little known beyond the circles of their local customers that none of the authorities whom the investigators consulted in each county thought them worth mentioning if, indeed, they knew of them.

During the last twenty-five years (but with a gap of nearly ten years from 1940) I have been in touch with quilters in South Wales, County Durham and Northumberland, and from the first I have been interested in the traditional lore of their craft, though up to 1939 I was chiefly concerned with organizing the sale of their work. All the notes which I had made before that date were destroyed when the offices of the Rural Institutes Bureau were damaged in the London blitz, but much remained in my memory and in 1948 it was suggested by Mr. D. L. Jones, O.B.E., secretary of Monmouthshire Rural Community Council, and by Dr. Iowerth Peate, M.A., D.Sc., F.S.A., Keeper in Charge of the Welsh Folk Museum in St. Fagan’s Castle, that all available information about Welsh traditional quilting ought to be collected and put on record. The Rural Industries Bureau undertook to finance the investigation and at a later stage Mr. Cosmo Clark, its Director, decided that my survey should be extended to the north of England—an idea which I welcomed as enabling me to give a more complete picture of the industry. In the course of my investigation I have been in touch with over one hundred and fifty quilters, most of whom I have talked to. Mr. D. L. Jones, who has given me much help, made contact with many Welsh quilters by means of broadcasts, letters to the local press and conferences, and sent out many questionaries which produced some information on basic facts and suggested lines for the start of my enquiry. The exhibition of old and new quilts which was organized by Mr. Jones and the Welsh Folk Museum at St. Fagan’s Castle in July 1951 provided me with the opportunity to study a quantity of the best work of today side by side with many fine old quilts. But my information has been collected chiefly in conversation with quilters and owners of old quilts, with some correspondence to clear up doubtful points. Quilters, like other traditional craftsmen, often dogmatize, each one tending to recognize only her own way as the right way. Therefore a representative picture can only be composed after prolonged enquiry. I have tried to put on record as much variety of opinion as possible, but in Chapter Four I have, for the sake of clarity in describing the way in which a quilt is made, concentrated on the technique of one particular worker.

My information about quilting in the United States has been gathered from three books: Marie D. Webster, in Quilts—Their Story and How to Make Them (Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1915) ranges over many subjects and is interested mainly in patchwork and very little in quilting. Ruth E. Finley, in Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them, also assumes that anything called a quilt is made of patchwork and does not pay much attention to the patterns or technique of quilting. Florence Peto, in American Quilts and Coverlets (Max Parrish & Co., Ltd., 1949) gives an interesting chronological account of quilts and coverlets of many varieties and recognizes quilting as a craft in its own right.

It is not easy to study traditional quilting today except by visiting the workers themselves and other local people who still cherish old quilts. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a considerable number of quilted garments, and some quilts, of English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century workmanship, and although very few of these may be on view at any given time they can all be examined by anyone interested who writes to the Textiles Department of the Museum to make an appointment. The Welsh Folk Museum has some Welsh work and there are a few pieces, I believe, scattered amongst the provincial museums. There is a charming miniature Queen Anne quilt on a doll’s bed in Parham House, an Elizabethan house in Sussex which is open to the public on certain days, and there may be quilts on view in other great houses. But nearly all such specimens which I have seen are of the grander kind; the cottage or farmhouse quilt was not thought worthy of preservation, although probably it would be more interesting to us today in showing the trend of tradition through the ages. I think this book will serve a useful purpose if it only encourages owners to cherish even their humblest old quilts and, if a time comes when no member of the family cares to preserve them, to offer them to museums, together with any appurtenances of the craft, such as frames (particularly any of unusual type) and templates, especially the more durable sort of wood or tin.

I am indebted to a great many people for help in compiling the material for this book. Without the backing of the Rural Industries Bureau I could not have collected the information; various members of its staff, as well as Rural Industries organizers in the provinces, have helped in several ways, Mr. J. N. White, the Bureau’s Information Officer, in particular; Mr. Victor Schafer deserves special mention for his work in photographing the quilts (always difficult subjects) and especially for the series of pictures of a quilter at work which show the technique of quilting in a way which has not, I think, been attempted before. Mrs. F. M. Fletcher, who cheerfully endured considerable discomfort as the subject (or perhaps I should say the victim) of this sequence, has also earned my deep gratitude for the immense amount of help she has given me by answering my questions, seeking out interesting quilts for me to see, lending her drawings of templates and patterns (on which the diagrams on pages 79, 80, 81, 117 and 119 are based) and reading Chapter Four. Mrs. Gordon Hake, Miss Muriel Rose, Miss Helen FitzRandolph (who supplied the information in Appendix II about agricultural labourers’ earnings), Mr. W. E. Rains (who answered my enquiries about the manufacture of cotton-wool and wadding), all deserve my thanks for their help. Finally I acknowledge with much gratitude the kindness of all those who in various ways helped me to find and examine old quilts (especially the Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmorland Federations of Women’s Institutes), and the great number of quilters and quilt owners who cheerfully gave their time and ransacked their stores to share their knowledge with me and to show me their work and, in many cases, lent precious quilts to be photographed. They are too many to be named here, and every one of them has contributed something to this book.

1 English Quilting Old and New, by Elizabeth Hake. Batsford, 1937.

2 The Rural Industries of England and Wales, vols. I–III (England), by Helen E. FitzRandolph and M. Doriel Hay; vol. IV (Wales), by Anna M. Jones. Clarendon Press, 1916–27.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

THE Author and Publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the photographs included in this book: The British Council, for fig. 45; The Farmers’ Weekly, for fig. 17; The National Museum of Wales, Welsh Folk Museum, for fig. 9; Miss Muriel Rose, for fig. 4; the Rural Industries Bureau, for figs. 1, 3, 5, 6, 11-15, 18-44, 46, 48-51, 53-5 and 57; Mrs. Thompson, for fig. 7; the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, for figs. 2, 10 and 52; Watson’s Studios, Aberdare, for fig. 16.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HALF-TONE PLATES

1 Quilt made by Mrs. Coulthard, Weardale, with feather twist border

2 Silk petticoat, eighteenth century

3 Eighteenth-century farmhouse quilt of woollen homespun

4 Cot quilt in sea-waves pattern

5 Part of a wedding quilt made about 1911

6 Pieces of quilted blue silk probably intended for a petticoat

7 Mussel gathers at Runswick about 1870, some wearing quilted skirts

8 An unusual type of quilting frame from Weardale, with ratchets

9 Quilt by Miss Emiah Jones, Carmarthenshire

10 Yellow silk quilt, eighteenth century

11 Patchwork quilt made by Joseph Hedley

12 The Red Star quilt made by Elizabeth Sanderson

13 Part of a quilt by Miss J. M. Edwards, Glamorgan

14 Part of a quilt made by Miss E. L. Hall, Northumberland

15 Red and white patchwork quilt made by Mrs. Anne Paulin

16 A Welsh quilter nearing the centre of a big quilt

17 Mrs. Lace and Mrs. Olivia Evans demonstrating at the Welsh Folk Museum, St. Fagan’s Castle

18 A County Durham quilter considers her templates

19 Needle-marking the outline of a template on the top cover

20 Using a penny to mark the middle of the feather pattern

21 Marking the other lines freehand

22 Oversewing the bottom cover to the runner

23 The stretcher is fixed with pegs to give the right width

24 Wadding is laid carefully on the bottom cover

25 Tacking along the near side of the frame

26 The three layers are needled along the far side of the frame

27 Tape is needled to all three thicknesses and looped round the stretcher

28 Sewing the quilt

29 Working in the opposite direction, the needle pointed away from the quilter

30 Showing the number of stitches taken up on the needle

31 Sewing the quilt; seen from the worker’s point of view

32, 33 The quilter’s left hand under the work

34 Red and white patchwork quilt, about 1870–75

35 Late nineteenth-century quilt of strip patchwork

36 Quilt by Mrs. Armstrong, Northumberland

37 A characteristic Welsh quilt

38 Pink and white patchwork quilt from Northumberland

39 Patchwork quilt in baskets pattern

40 White quilt with applied pattern in Turkey red and green prints

41 Red and white calico coverlet made of groups of gathered patches joined by flat triangular and rhomboid patches

42 Centre of a quilt with Tudor rose and other patterns

43 Detail of red and white calico coverlet

44 Quilt by Mrs. D. K. Walters, Glamorgan

45 Quilt by Miss G. K. Evans, Glamorgan

46, 47 Typical examples of County Durham work since about 1930

48 Quilt by Mrs. Irene Morgan, Glamorgan

49 Quilt by Mrs. Edgell, Monmouthshire

50 Quilt by Mrs. M. Nicholas, Glamorgan

51 Part of a quilt made in Elsdon, Northumberland, before 1900

52 Part of an eighteenth-century cradle quilt

53 Small quilt by Miss Gwen Stone, Glamorgan

54 Cot quilt by Mrs. Jenny Hitchcock, County Durham

55 Small quilt by Miss Irene Morgan, Glamorgan

56 Small quilt by Miss Emiah Jones, Carmarthenshire

57 Quilt by Mrs. Muriel Davies, Carmarthenshire

LINE ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Quilting frames—medium size

Uses of circle templates

Fillings

Border Patterns

Feather templates

North Country templates

Uses of bell