[Sca-cooks] OT documenting quilts

[Jeanne Papanastasiou]

On my quilting section is a link to quilting history.  "Quilted" is
documented.  As quilted protection under armour, but "quilting" especially
as we know it today has only been around under 200 years.

Soffya
http://www.aeonline.biz/Links.htm

-----Original Message-----
From: sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org
[mailto:sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org]On Behalf Of Rosine
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 6:19 PM
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] OT documenting quilts


> There is an privately published work by a gentle in the SCA:
> _Historical Quilting_ by Lady Caitlin nic Raigne

I've heard of her work. I think I heard rumor that she might be submitting a
CA in the near future.

> According to her research, it appears that for most of our period,
> wholecloth, trapunto, and applique are the most common styles used.
> Patchwork doesn't seem to be as common, and is used more in
> garment design than for bedcoverings.

   It's very much a "so far as we know" type of thing. That's why the cope
has caused so much discussion - it raises questions we thought were settled.
In the piecing of this cope, I can identify three patchwork motifs that I
learned as a child - Log Cabin, Flying Geese, and "spinning star" (which is
one of those patterns that seems to have a thousand names). The thing is, we
don't have any extant patchwork quilts, all we do have is this cope which
was designed specifically to mimic one so the priest's disguise would not be
blown. Logically, a patchwork blanket would have to be extremely common else
a "poor wandering tinker or tradesman" wouldn't have one and the disguise
would be worthless.
   Added to that is the maxim that things don't generally appear from a
vacuum. The quilt patterns themselves are commonly recognised-even-now
motifs, which would be odd to have sprung "whole cloth" (as it were) from
the imagination of one Royal Catholic sympathiser. Occam's Razor says that
quilts had to have existed... but it upsets everything that we've been
taught as gospel about piecework being uniquely "American in development",
so the deduction is bitterly contested.
   Personally, I think that scrap fabric was too valuable NOT to use and
patchwork blankets were as necessary then as they became during the pioneer
days - because wastefulness may have been a Noble's prerogative, but it
certainly wasn't one that the poor and lower class could afford. What
surprised me was that it wasn't a "crazy quilt" type of work, which would
have use more of the available fabric, but was instead a set of definite
patterned squares.
   Until we have more than one item that is only a mimic of a blanket,
though, it is going to be a "grey area of opinion".

Rosine


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