Quaker Quilts from the Delaware River Valley, 1760-1890

From Patricia J. Keller,
  "Of the Best Sort but Plain: "Quaker Quilts from the Delaware Valley, 1760 - 1890  
      Chadds Ford, Penna.: Brandywine River Museum, 1996.

        Eighteenth-century Delaware Valley Quaker quilts tend to be filled with undyed carried wool rather than cotton batting.  The same is often true of silk-faced pieced quilts or whole cloth examples made by Quaker women in this region in the nineteenth century.  The undyed carded wool filling and sustained use of silk throughout this period represent a very distinctive tradition at a time when most American quilt makers were using cotton textiles for piecing and cotton batting for filling.  Several of the quilts incorporate large pieces taken from elaborately stitched silk or wool petticoats, after the waistband had been removed and the pocket slits sewn together.  Fabric borders were added to three or four sides of the refashioned petticoat pieces, and the whole was quilted in a framed, or bordered, pattern - the same type of quilting layout often selected for whole cloth quilts and quilts of center medallion construction. 
Like upper- and middle-class English women of the time, many Delaware Valley Quaker women favored multicolored silks pieced in mosaics of diamonds or hexagons or geometric block patterns worked in silks or cottons.  Some of the silks used were undoubtedly bought for the purpose, while others may have been scraps remaining from home dressmaking projects.  A significant number were reportedly made from recycled wedding dresses and shawls.  One nineteenth-century Quaker quilt maker noted that she had dyed pieces of her mother's silk wedding shawl to create four brilliant magenta strips for her strip-set silk quilt.
A number of quilts were pieced with the help of paper templates usually cut from old letters, copy books, or old newspapers to which the pieces of fabric were basted.  The basted units were then whipstitched together to form a block or a mosaic.  The papers were removed before the front of the quilt was joined to the filling & the backing.  Templates were useful to assure exactness in cutting, hemming, & piecing patterns like hexagons or diamonds.  They also assured uniformity of workmanship across the entire quilt. 
Many of the Delaware Valley Quaker quilts exhibit one or the other of two different edge finishing techniques.  On some, the raw edges of the facing & backing fabrics were turned in & stitched together, often with a double line of stitching.  This technique is most often found on English quilts of the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries.  In the other technique a commercially woven cotton-twill tape or silk grosgrain, plain woven, or brocaded ribbon was sewn over the raw or individually hemmed edges of the front & back face.  More rarely, edges were finished by turning the backing fabric over the front of the quilt or vice-versa or by applying a straight-cut strip of fabric to the edge.  Sometimes two edging techniques were used in combination on a single quilt. 
The strip-set quilt attained popularity in England in the third & fourth quarters of the nineteenth century.  At around the same time, pieced quilts in plain or strip-set patterns found favor among Delaware Valley Quaker women.  The Delaware Valley versions were faced with either silk or cotton fabrics.  Usually, the strips were individually quilted with one or a series of border patterns arranged symmetrically on either side of the center strip.