107 Fun Facts About Quilting

What is the strip of fabric that wraps and finishes a quilt's raw edges called?

Binding is added in the last stage of making a quilt, and strips cut on the bias stretch enough to follow curved edges.

What is the soft padding layer sandwiched inside a quilt called?

Batting, called wadding in Britain, fills the middle of a quilt; less wealthy Swedish quilters once used linen scraps, rags or paper mixed with animal hair.

The word "quilt" traces back to the Latin culcita, meaning what?

Culcita meant a stuffed cushion or mattress, and Medieval Latin culcita puncta, a quilted mattress, also gave English the word counterpane.

Which legend is shown on one of the earliest surviving quilts, a 14th-century linen coverlet now at London's V&A?

Its Tristan and Isolde scenes show Tristan fighting Morholt, the Irish champion who came to Cornwall demanding tribute from King Mark.

One of the earliest surviving quilts, a 14th-century linen coverlet split between London and Florence, was made on which island?

Made in Sicily around 1390, it bears the three hunting horns of Florence's Guicciardini family, who kept one section until the Bargello bought it in 1927.

Which quilting technique raises chosen motifs into relief by pushing extra padding in from behind?

Trapunto, from the Italian for 'to quilt', raises motifs by parting the threads of a looser backing and inserting rolls of cotton.

Boutis, quilts with raised motifs worked by hand, are a traditional craft of which French region?

Provence's boutis quilts get their relief from cotton wicks pushed between two layers of cloth with a double-eyed boxwood needle.

Traditional Japanese sashiko stitching is best known for which colour combination?

White thread on indigo cloth is sashiko's classic look, and the running stitch is now popular again for repairing worn clothes.

What does the Japanese word sashiko literally mean?

Sashiko, meaning little stabs, began in the Edo period to strengthen homespun clothes, and by the Meiji era was winter work in northern farming villages.

Nakshi kantha quilts are traditionally stitched together using thread pulled from what?

Old saris supplied the thread, and the worn cloth layers were weighted on the ground and sewn with rows of large basting stitches whenever there was time.

Ralli quilts are traditionally made in western India and which neighbouring country?

Rallis come from Sindh in Pakistan and neighbouring Gujarat and Rajasthan in India; the name comes from ralanna, a word meaning to mix or connect.

Which company introduced the first rotary cutter in 1979?

OLFA, the Japanese firm that invented the snap-off blade, designed its cutter for garment making, but quilters adopted it almost immediately.

Traditional hand-quilting needles, smaller and stronger than ordinary sewing needles, are called what?

Betweens are shorter than sharps, and their very small eye avoids a bump at the head of the needle when pulling thread through all the layers.

In a traditional Log Cabin quilt block, what colour is the hearth-symbolising centre square?

Red is said to stand for the hearth, and during the Civil War Log Cabin quilts helped raise money for Union soldiers.

The Double Wedding Ring pattern of interlocking circles first came to prominence during which period?

The Great Depression made the pattern a favourite, and finished Double Wedding Ring quilts are still often given to commemorate marriages.

English embroidery and Japanese art at which event sparked the crazy quilt craze?

The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 likely drove the craze, and its Japanese art included pottery with a cracked, 'crazed' glaze.

Which magazine estimated in 1884 that a full-size crazy quilt could take 1,500 hours to complete?

Harper's Bazaar made the estimate as crazy quilts of velvet, satin and silk scraps, heavy with embroidery, became a fashion among well-off women.

Japanese-inspired stitching on Victorian crazy quilts often resembled fans and which other motif?

Stitching shaped like a spider and its web, alongside fans, echoed the Japanese designs that American audiences admired and helped launch the fashion.

Which city names the 1840s album quilts with a different appliquéd design in every block?

Baltimore album quilts could carry a signature on every block, thanks to a newly discovered indelible ink.

Which actress starred in the 1995 film How to Make an American Quilt?

Winona Ryder led a cast that included Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn and Maya Angelou in the film adaptation of the novel.

Hawaiian quilting descends from kapa moe, an indigenous bed covering made from what?

The inner bark of trees was beaten into kapa, and Hawaiian quilting is thought to have begun when missionaries brought Western fabrics in the 1820s.

Traditional Amish quilts are pieced from geometric shapes using only what kind of fabric?

Solid colours reflect the Amish rejection of 'worldly' styles, the same rule that keeps printed fabrics out of Amish clothing.

Lancaster County Amish quilters are especially known for the Bars pattern and which other design?

Diamond-in-a-Square and Bars quilts from Lancaster County have wide borders with lavish quilting, while midwestern Amish quilts favour narrower borders.

The celebrated quilters of Gee's Bend live in which US state?

Gee's Bend sits in a horseshoe bend of the Alabama River, and in 2006 the US Postal Service put ten of its quilts on a sheet of stamps.

In which city did the 2002 touring exhibition that brought Gee's Bend quilts national fame open?

Houston's Museum of Fine Arts debuted the show, which toured museums nationwide as critics hailed the quilts as some of the most miraculous art America has produced.

Which Hawaiian queen stitched a famous crazy quilt while imprisoned after the monarchy's overthrow?

Liliʻuokalani's crazy quilt is still kept at ʻIolani Palace, where she was imprisoned after the failed 1895 rebellion.

Harriet Powers, maker of the 1886 Bible Quilt, was born into slavery in which state?

Born near Athens, Georgia, Powers first showed her Bible Quilt at the 1886 Athens Cotton Fair; her two surviving quilts are in Washington and Boston.

Faith Ringgold's story quilt Tar Beach shows a young girl flying over which New York neighbourhood?

Harlem-born Faith Ringgold made the rooftop of Cassie's Harlem apartment building the 'tar beach', and turned to quilts partly to step away from Western painting traditions.

Faith Ringgold's picture book Tar Beach was runner-up for which picture-book illustration award?

Ringgold's first book, Tar Beach was a 1992 Caldecott Honor Book, runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, and it won the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration.

Which activist conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1985 after seeing names taped to a building like a patchwork?

Cleve Jones had marchers write names of the dead on placards and tape them to San Francisco's Federal Building during the 1985 march for Harvey Milk and George Moscone.

Each AIDS Memorial Quilt panel measures 3 by 6 feet, a size meant to reflect what?

The grave-sized panels mattered because many who died early in the pandemic were refused funerals, so a panel was often their only memorial.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt debuted on the National Mall in 1987 during a march for what?

Gay rights brought marchers to Washington in October 1987, when the Quilt's 1,920 panels covered more than a football field and drew half a million visitors.

Who narrated the Oscar-winning 1989 documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt?

Dustin Hoffman narrated the HBO film, whose score was by Bobby McFerrin; that same year the NAMES Project was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The National Quilt Museum, home of the annual QuiltWeek, is in which city?

Paducah, Kentucky, is nicknamed 'Quilt City, USA', and in 2008 Congress designated its museum the National Quilt Museum of the United States.

The International Quilt Museum, home to the largest known public quilt collection, is in which city?

Lincoln, Nebraska's museum began when Ardis and Robert James gave the University of Nebraska almost 950 quilts, and in 2018 it showed Ken Burns' own collection.

Which New York institution's 1971 show Abstract Design in American Quilts first hung quilts like paintings?

The Whitney hung the quilts on its walls like paintings, a display that became standard and helped shift quilts from domestic craft to art objects.

The founding Modern Quilt Guild formed in October 2009 in which city?

Los Angeles quilters formed the first guild in October 2009, and the Modern Quilt Guild went on to launch QuiltCon, an annual modern quilting convention.

The first QuiltCon, the annual modern-quilting convention, was held in February 2013 in which city?

Austin hosted the first QuiltCon on February 21-24, 2013, and was host again in 2020, when the show featured 400 juried modern quilts.

The Rajah Quilt was sewn in 1841 by convict women sailing from England to where?

Hobart was the Rajah's destination, and sewing supplies carried aboard for its 180 women became the quilt now held by the National Gallery of Australia.

Legend says quilts sent coded messages to travellers on which secret network?

The Underground Railroad quilt code is folklore: historians find no mention of it in the thousands of slave narratives, memoirs or diaries of the time.

Which author wrote Everyday Use, about a mother choosing which daughter gets the family quilts?

Alice Walker ends the story with Mama giving the quilts to Maggie, who will use them, instead of Dee, who wants to hang them on her walls.

In the American Midwest, what is a bed cover whose layers are tied together with yarn rather than quilted called?

A comforter, as Midwesterners call a tied bed cover, is finished with square knots so it can be washed without the ties coming undone.

Roughly how many block patterns does Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns document?

Brackman catalogued about 4,000 pieced patterns published in print between 1830 and 1970, and most fit grids such as Four Patch or Nine Patch.

What was the name of the quilted medieval garment worn under or instead of chain mail?

The gambeson later developed into the quilted doublet, worn as part of European men's clothing from the 14th to the 17th century.

Which motif was once thought unlucky on wedding quilts, so makers used tulips to symbolise love instead?

Hearts were avoided for fear that the couple's hearts might be broken, a superstition that made tulips the stand-in for love.

The Native American quilt design of one large eight-pointed star is also known by what name?

Star quilts replaced buffalo robes as gifts at Plains births, marriages and tribal elections.

Seminole piecing developed among Seminoles living in which state?

Florida Seminole and Miccosukee women developed the style once sewing machines arrived around 1900, and its patterns grew far more elaborate over time.

Mola textiles, famous for reverse appliqué, are made by the Kuna people of Colombia and which other country?

Most Guna, or Kuna, live in Panama's autonomous comarcas, and mola panels form the blouses of Guna women's everyday traditional dress.

Psychiatrist William Rush Dunton, who prescribed quilting to patients, helped found which professional body?

Dunton helped found what became the American Occupational Therapy Association in 1917, and his self-published 1946 book Old Quilts is now a collector's item.

Foundation work, sewing fabric onto a temporary or permanent base, is also called what?

Paper piecing on the frontier used letters, postcards and catalogue pages as foundations, and paper found inside old quilts now helps historians study pioneer life.

The earliest known quilted garment appears on an ivory figure of a pharaoh from which Egyptian dynasty?

That First Dynasty ivory carving depicts the earliest known quilted garment, while a quilted floor covering found in Mongolia in 1924 dates to about 100 BC-AD 200.

Quilted bedding appeared across Europe around the twelfth century after whose return from the Middle East?

The Crusaders are usually thought to have brought quilting back from the Middle East, and bed quilts began appearing in European households between the 11th and 13th centuries.

In American Colonial times, most quilts were of which kind?

Whole-cloth quilts were one large piece of fabric held together with fine needlework, while appliquéd broderie perse quilts were also popular.

A 1620s embroidered silk quilt linked to Leeds Castle and an East India Company founder came from which region?

Bengal made the yellow silk quilt, now at Colonial Williamsburg; its label names Catherine Colepeper, linking it to Leeds Castle and the Smythe family.

The densely stitched North Country quilts of north-east England are also named after which city?

Durham quilts, also called North Country quilts, include some made of sateen, which heightens the effect of their dense stitching.

Tivaevae, ceremonial quilts given at weddings, are made by women of which Pacific nation?

The Cook Islands are thought to have learned quilting from 19th-century missionaries, and tivaevae remain prized gifts on important occasions.

Egyptian khayamiya, still hand-sewn in Cairo's Street of the Tentmakers, differ from true quilts by lacking what?

Khayamiya have a heavy back and a fine appliquéd top but no central insulating layer, and were made to line the insides of tents.

Karen Nyberg stitched a star-themed block in 2013 to become the first person ever to quilt where?

In Earth orbit, aboard the International Space Station, Nyberg sewed a small star block, and more than 2,200 quilters later sent astronomical blocks of their own to join it.

Which future US president, trained as a tailor, sewed a quilt as a gift for his first love, Mary Wood?

Andrew Johnson made the quilt while working in Laurens, South Carolina, as a runaway apprentice, but Mary Wood turned down his marriage proposal.

Which documentary filmmaker lent about a third of his personal quilt collection to a university museum show in 2018?

Ken Burns, maker of the series Baseball and Jazz, is an avid quilt collector, and the 2018 exhibition of his pieces ran for nearly four months.

Which Margaret Atwood novel about a convicted Victorian-era maid names each of its 15 sections after a quilt pattern?

Alias Grace fictionalises the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, and its patchwork of letters, poems and news reports mirrors the quilts Grace Marks sews.

Which baking staple came in printed cotton sacks that thrifty 1930s farm families recycled into dresses and quilts?

Flour and feed mills noticed the habit and printed their sacks in dress-worthy designs, and neighbours traded sacks to collect enough of one print.

Jenny Doan, often called the most famous quilter in the world, built her following with tutorials on which platform?

YouTube was her children's idea after a slow first year for the family's small quilting business, and her channel has since passed 210 million views.

Quilts of Valor, a foundation begun in 2003 after its founder's vivid dream, awards handmade quilts to which group?

War veterans and serving troops receive them: founder Catherine Roberts dreamed of a despairing young man wrapped in a quilt while her own son was deployed in Iraq.

Which quilting machine has an industrial sewing head that rides on tracks along a frame up to 14 feet wide?

A longarm lets the quilter steer the machine over the fabric instead of feeding fabric through it, often tracing a pattern called a pantograph with a laser pointer.

Painted quilt blocks on barns mark out driving routes called quilt trails, which began in 2001 in which US state?

Ohio's Adams County started the idea after Donna Sue Groves set out to honour her mother Maxine, a noted quilter, with a painted square on the family barn.

A digitabulist is a collector of which small sewing tool, found in almost every hand quilter's kit?

Thimbles take their name from the Old English word for thumb, and early Meissen porcelain ones were given as keepsakes too delicate to sew with.

Which magazine launched designer Marie Webster's career by printing four of her quilt designs in full colour in 1911?

Ladies' Home Journal then asked Webster to write under her own byline, opening the way for other professional women quilters to put their names to their work.

Which Singer sewing machine, the Model 221 unveiled at a 1930s World's Fair, became a lasting favourite of quilters?

Featherweight machines weighed only 11 pounds thanks to an aluminium body, and Singer sold an estimated three million or more of them.

Jogakbo, wrapping cloths pieced from leftover scraps of silk and ramie, are a traditional craft of which country?

Korea's jogakbo were sewn mainly by women of the Joseon dynasty out of frugality, and their bold grids have been compared to paintings by Piet Mondrian.

Kawandi quilts are made in Karnataka, India, by the Siddi community, whose ancestors were brought from which region?

East Africa echoes in the style, which is finished with small folded triangles of fabric called phula sewn onto each corner.

Which American-born patchwork fabric designer was the first living textile artist given a solo show at London's V&A?

Kaffe Fassett settled in England in 1964, and his 1988 exhibition followed years of designing knitwear with the fashion designer Bill Gibb.

Which artist quilts vivid life-size portraits of Black Americans and was commissioned for Time magazine covers in 2020?

Bisa Butler builds her subjects out of kente cloth and African wax prints, a way of dressing them in the fabrics of their ancestors.

Which novelist's bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series began in 1999 with The Quilter's Apprentice?

Jennifer Chiaverini went on to publish six collections of quilt patterns inspired by the novels and to design Elm Creek fabric lines for quilters.

Which simple checkerboard-style block is often the first one that a child learning to quilt is taught to make?

Nine-patch blocks are nothing more than three rows of three squares, usually alternating dark and light fabrics.

The New England Quilt Museum, the second-oldest quilt museum in the United States, is in which Massachusetts city?

Lowell has hosted the museum since 1987, and it later moved into the historic Lowell Institute for Savings building for more gallery and classroom room.

Carolyn Mazloomi, founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network, earned her doctorate in which field?

Aerospace engineering was her profession while she kept experimenting with quilts, and in 2014 she won a National Heritage Fellowship, the top US folk-arts honour.

The small strawberry attached to a classic tomato pincushion is filled with which abrasive to clean and sharpen pins?

Emery powder scours pins and needles each time they are pushed in, while the tomato design itself most likely dates from the Victorian era.

Arpilleras, patchwork pictures sewn by women to protest a 1970s and 80s military dictatorship, come from which country?

Chile's arpilleras, named after the Spanish word for burlap, were made in church-run workshops and secretly sent abroad to expose abuses under Augusto Pinochet.

For a 19th-century subscription quilt, members of a community paid a fee to have what embroidered on the top?

Their names raised the money: each signature was paid for, and the proceeds were often handed to a departing minister as a farewell gift.

What do quilters call the long temporary stitches, also known as tacking, that hold layers together before quilting?

Basting stitches are deliberately overlong and left unfinished at the ends, so they pull out easily once the permanent stitching is done.

Crazy quilts are named for irregular patches scattered like the 'crazed', or finely cracked, surface of what?

Glazed pottery with a crackled finish was among the Japanese art that fascinated Americans in the late 1800s, just as these showy quilts came into fashion.

Which tightly woven edge of a fabric do quilters tend to cut off right after washing and before cutting their pieces?

Selvage is a corruption of 'self-edge', and it is often woven differently from the rest of the fabric, which is why it so often ends up discarded.

The first US museum devoted solely to quilts and textiles as an art form was founded in 1977 in which state?

California's Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association started it in Los Altos, and it later became the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles.

Simply Quilts, the long-running television series hosted by quilter Alex Anderson, aired on which cable channel?

HGTV ran the show for 13 seasons; when first approached about hosting, Anderson said she was busy teaching a class and asked to talk it over at lunch.

Ku'u Hae Aloha quilts from Hawaii surround the royal coat of arms or crown with four copies of which emblem?

The kingdom's flag is honoured in the name, which means My Beloved Flag, and the style may date from an 1843 British order to destroy every Hawaiian flag.

The Quilt of Belonging, a 120-foot textile with a block for every nation in the world, was made in which country?

Canada's Quilt of Belonging was started by the artist Esther Bryan, and its blocks also honour each of the country's First Peoples.

Which quilt-shop precut is a half-yard of fabric cut in half across its width, squarer than a standard strip?

A fat quarter covers the same area as a quarter-yard cut from the full width of the roll, but its chunkier shape has made it a patchwork favourite.

Which sewing-machine attachment, used in quilting and bag making, feeds the top layer so stacked layers do not shift?

A walking foot keeps the upper layers moving with the lower ones, and it climbs up and down thick or uneven layers more easily than other feeds.

Woven fabric is stretchiest along which diagonal grain, running at 45 degrees to the warp and weft?

The bias stretches so readily that neckties and softly draping dresses are cut along it, while quilters take care that bias-cut patches do not distort.

Which quilt pattern grew out of Bertha Corbett's early 1900s drawings of little girls whose faces are never shown?

Sunbonnet Sue began as the Sunbonnet Babies, and Corbett's brother said their mother suggested the bonnets to spare her the difficulty of drawing faces.

The Cathedral Window quilt block is made from which plain cotton fabric, folded to frame small bright squares?

Muslin folded into interlocking circles makes the frames, and the finished blocks are heavy enough that such quilts are often made with no padding at all.

The Quilters Hall of Fame occupies designer Marie Webster's former home, a National Historic Landmark in which state?

Indiana's Marie Webster House in Marion was rescued from demolition by her granddaughter, who bought it and gave it to the Hall of Fame.

Which Log Cabin block variation arranges its strips as two contrasting hourglasses, one vertical and one horizontal?

Courthouse Steps was one of two frequent variations of a block so loved in the 1800s that county fairs gave it a prize category of its own.

Which Missouri newspaper first published designer Ruby McKim and later carried her regular quilt pattern feature?

The Kansas City Star printed McKim's first block designs after she won one of its contests, and her pattern column passed to Eveline Foland in 1930.

Which British artist does the V&A name among those who used patchwork and quilting to explore ideas of 'women's art'?

Tracey Emin took up these crafts at the end of the 20th century, decades after 1960s fashion had adopted patchwork as part of the hippie look.

Which quilter won Good Housekeeping's 1978 Great American Quilt Contest with her hand-pieced Ray of Light?

Jinny Beyer had made her first quilt while living in India, where she ran out of yarn and instead cut 600 patches from local fabrics.

According to legend, a quilt hung from a clothesline or windowsill showed people fleeing slavery the way to what?

A safe house is what the hanging quilt is said to have marked, though historians have found no evidence for the code beyond one family's oral tradition.

In the quilt-code story, the Monkey Wrench pattern, displayed first, told enslaved people planning an escape to do what?

Gather their tools was the message, said Raymond Dobard, who co-wrote the book behind the legend, along with getting physically and mentally prepared to leave the plantation.

In the quilt-code legend, which block told runaways to follow an animal's path through the mountains to food and water?

Bear's Paw was the favourite pattern of Raymond Dobard, who co-wrote the book behind the legend; he said bears always head for water, berries and other natural food.

In the quilt-code legend, the Drunkard's Path block warned runaways to travel in what way, in case hounds followed?

In a zigzag is the meaning believers give the block, though some historians point out that many of the code's patterns probably did not yet exist in the 1850s.

Believers in the quilt code say which pattern of triangles told runaways to follow migrating birds north in spring?

Flying Geese, built from triangles and rectangles, is said to have meant follow the geese north, or listen for them when the sky was not clear.

The quilt-code story about slave escapes spread after being treated as fact on which daytime television programme?

The Oprah Winfrey Show was one stop on the story's way into museum exhibits and children's textbooks, and the book behind it sold more than 200,000 copies.

Which 1999 book by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard popularised the idea of escape codes sewn into slave quilts?

Hidden in Plain View rests on one family's oral history, and before it appeared the codes were unheard of even among African American quilters.

Jacqueline Tobin first heard the quilt-code story from Ozella McDaniel Williams, a quilt seller in which Southern city?

Charleston, South Carolina, was where Tobin bought a quilt from Williams in 1994 and was told the patterns' meanings had been handed down by the women of her family.

Historians objected in 2007 when a Central Park memorial to which abolitionist was to include a granite quilt?

Frederick Douglass had no known link to the legend of quilts coded to guide escaping slaves, which historian David Blight dismissed as folklore largely invented in the 1990s.

Historian Giles Wright noted that no quilt code appears in 1930s interviews with ex-slaves run by which New Deal agency?

Works Progress Administration interviewers recorded the memories of formerly enslaved people, and Wright found no mention of coded quilts there or in any memoir or diary.