There comes a certain evening every year when you feel it. Summer hasn’t quite left us. The garden is being generous, the lawn still needs mowing, and some afternoons are warm enough that autumn seems a long way off. But then, sometime after supper, you notice that the air coming through an open window feels just a little different. It's cooler and crisper, and suddenly the old quilt folded over the back of a chair begins to look especially inviting.

I think we are coming into quilt season.

I have always loved old quilts. There is something about them that simply feels like home. They are beautiful, certainly, but quilts were never meant only to be admired. They were made to work. They warmed beds in cold rooms, covered sleeping children, were tucked around someone who was sick, and sometimes lasted long enough to warm several generations of the same family. Long before we began hanging old quilts on walls and displaying them as works of art, people were living beneath them.

Quilts Are Older Than We Sometimes Realize

Quilting itself is much older than the American patchwork quilt we so often picture when we think of days gone by. The practice of stitching layers of cloth together with some sort of padding between them reaches back for centuries. One of the oldest surviving European examples, known as the Tristan Quilt, dates to sometime around the late 1300s. By the time European settlers were establishing homes here in America, quilting traditions had already been passed down through generations.

An American whole-cloth quilt made in New England around 1750,

a reminder that early quilts did not always resemble the patchwork quilts we often picture today.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

Some of the earliest American quilts looked quite different from the scrap quilts many of us associate with our grandmothers. During the eighteenth century, whole-cloth quilts were common. Instead of piecing together dozens or hundreds of small pieces, a quilt might be made from large lengths of wool or cotton fabric. The beauty came from the fabric itself and from the elaborate patterns stitched through the layers. Wool was often used for the filling, particularly in colder parts of the country, although cotton and other materials were also used as they became available.

That is one reason I think it is important not to imagine that every old quilt began as a pile of worn-out clothing. Some quilts were made from very good, and sometimes quite expensive, fabric. They could be treasured household possessions and beautiful examples of a woman’s needlework.

When Clothing Had Another Life

But thrift certainly became part of the quilt story too, and this may be the part I love most.

Fabric once had value in a way that can be difficult for us to appreciate today. Clothing required time, labor and money to make, and a garment was not casually discarded simply because one part of it had worn out. A dress could be altered. A shirt could be patched. Good pieces could be cut away from the worn ones and saved. Eventually, those pieces might become part of something entirely different.

Perhaps an old dress had finished its work as a dress, but that didn’t mean the good fabric in it had finished being useful. It could graduate into another purpose and spend the next twenty years keeping someone warm at night.

It's easy to look at the pieces in an old quilt and wonder

what they may have been before they found their way here.

Waste not, want not.

Over time, quilts became wonderful records of that kind of resourcefulness. Dress fabrics, shirtings and other saved textiles could all find their way into a quilt. What might look to us like a random collection of scraps could once have held an entire family’s memories. A piece of Mother’s dress might lie beside a bit from Father’s shirt. There could be fabric left from a child’s clothing or something that once belonged elsewhere in the home. Even when we no longer know the names of the people connected to those pieces, an old quilt can still remind us that those fabrics once belonged to lives being lived.

What Was Inside an Old Quilt?

The inside of a quilt could tell a story of its own. Today, we can simply purchase a roll of perfectly even quilt batting, but earlier quiltmakers worked with what was available to them. Wool was commonly used, especially where sheep were raised and winters were cold. Cotton eventually became another common filling. Some heavy quilts did not require as much additional batting at all because several substantial layers of fabric already provided warmth.

Natural fiber prepared for spinning

As with so many old household skills, there wasn’t necessarily one single way of doing things. You used what you had, what you could afford, and what would best serve your family.

And Then There Were the Colors

Anyone who has spent time looking at antique quilts has probably noticed color combinations that are very different from what we might choose today. There can be rusty oranges, mustards, browns, deep reds, indigo blues and greens, sometimes sitting beside one another in patterns that seem unusual beneath the bright lighting of our modern homes.

But I sometimes think we need to look at those old quilts differently.

Those quilts were created for rooms that were experienced in a very different kind of light. During the daytime, families made use of natural light whenever they could. In the evening, a room might be warmed by the glow of a fire, candlelight or, in later years, lamplight. Light changes the way we experience color, and warm, gentle light can make deep reds, old golds, browns and oranges appear softer and richer than they sometimes do beneath our bright electric lights.

A hand-stitched quilt I made many years ago, still one of my favorites,

warmed by the glow of lamplight.

So instead of looking at an old quilt under an overhead light and wondering why someone chose those colors, imagine it spread across an old wooden bedstead on a cold evening, with a fire glowing nearby and a candle flickering on a bedside table. The very same colors begin to feel different. They become warmer and more at home in their surroundings.

Of course, some old fabrics have also changed with age. Dyes fade, fabrics mellow and years of use alter the appearance of a textile. What we see today is not always exactly what the quiltmaker saw when she first laid those pieces beside one another. Some of the fabrics that survive in antique quilts were actually quite rich and colorful when they were new.

Perhaps old quilts aren’t asking whether their colors match our homes today. Maybe they are asking us to imagine the homes they once belonged to.

Stitches That Remember

I used to make quilts when our children were younger. I made them for our children, and I made quilts for other people who asked. I don’t make them anymore. Life has different seasons, and sometimes the things that once occupied our hands regularly become things we simply remember how to do. But I don’t think I ever stopped loving quilts.

One little piece of that season of my life is still hanging in our home today. I made it more than thirty years ago, and instead of framing it in anything fancy, I tucked it behind an old window that came from the farmhouse where Joe grew up. The one we were living in at the time. I needed something behind the quilt to hold it in place, so I cut the cardboard from old cereal boxes and used it for backing. That was what I had, so that was what I used. Nothing wasted.

And all these years later, it's still here.

Remnants of an old quilt I made years ago with what I had on hand,

now framed in a salvaged window.

I love that, perhaps even more now than I did then. An old quilt piece, an old farmhouse window, and a few cereal boxes that were given one more useful purpose. None of it was expensive. None of it was meant to impress anyone. It was simply a matter of using what was already at hand and making something worth keeping.

Maybe part of that love comes from knowing just how personal a handmade quilt can be. Someone chose the fabrics. Someone cut every piece. Someone decided which piece should sit beside another. Then, little by little, those separate pieces were joined together until eventually they became something large enough to wrap around another person and keep them warm.

There is care in that.

There is also something about an old quilt that reminds me of a way of living I don’t think we should be too quick to leave behind. Take care of what you have. Repair things when you can. Find another purpose for something before deciding it has no usefulness left. Save the good pieces. Make something beautiful out of what remains.

Those ideas reach far beyond quilts.

Quilt Season

This time of year makes me think about quilts. When summer begins to turn toward autumn, our home begins changing right along with the season. The gardens are winding down. Food is being tucked onto pantry shelves. Firewood is being stacked. The evenings arrive a little earlier, and before long we begin pulling out the things that make a home warm and comfortable through the colder months.

Sometime soon, I will bring a few of our quilts back out from where they have spent the summer. One may go across a bed, another over the back of a chair, and one will undoubtedly end up within easy reach for a cool morning or evening.

One of our old quilts brought back out and kept close for

the cooler mornings and evenings ahead.

And when I do, I will probably think about all the women who did the same thing before us. Women who knew that the change of seasons meant a change in the work of the home. Women who saved good pieces of cloth because there was still usefulness left in them. Women who sat with needle and thread and slowly turned separate pieces into something that could warm the people they loved.

There is a comforting rhythm in these old seasonal habits. We don’t have to live exactly as people did two hundred years ago to understand the wisdom in some of the things they knew.

Take care of what you have. Use things well. Waste as little as possible. Make something beautiful when you can.

And when summer turns to autumn, keep a good quilt nearby.

With love from our homestead to yours,

Julie