Embroidery Articles - Crazy Quilt Embroidery

The Sharp Needle
© 2002

Crazy quilts are patchwork quilts that are put together with fabric scraps that are sewed in a seemingly haphazard fashion onto a ground fabric.  After the ground cloth is completely covered with fabric pieces, the fun begins and every seam, and perhaps large portions of the patch itself, are covered with decorative embroidery, lace, buttons, and anything else your heart desires.  A workshop that I took with Deanna Powell on crazy quilting is what turned me on to surface embroidery in general and is part of the reason that I write The Sharp Needle column.

Herstory

As with much embroidery, there is debate over the origins of crazy quilting.  Some consider crazy quilting the oldest form of American patchwork; some feel it originated in Great Britain during the Victorian era.  I tend to favor Judith Baker Montano’s belief that it is has its roots in Victorian England.  Victorian crazy quilts incorporated lush velvets, silks, satins, ribbons, and laces.  Many American women in the period 1837 – 1901(the Victorian era)  were practical, pioneer women who made use of every scrap of fabric for their patchwork quilts but certainly didn’t have access to silks and velvets for a quilt and had little time for the lavish embellishment that characterizes Victorian quilts. 

Crazy quilts, like other quilts, are fabric documents of history.  Many have bits of local history and memorabilia incorporated into the quilts.  A quote from Judith Baker Montano’s Crazy Quilt Handbook that is attributed to The Farm Journal, circa 1930, is a wonderful description of why women sewed crazy quilts.

…Into them women stitched their longings – their hunger for beauty, their impatience with the monotony of their days, their desire for change or adventure, their love for color, which common custom said they might not display in their dress.  And in the thrill of creating new colors and designing new patterns,, daring with cloth and needle to do what someone else had not done, the art of crazy quiltmaking…caused much excitement of fancy in days that would otherwise have been uneventful.

Crazy quilts are built upon a ground fabric, usually muslin.  Your choice of fancy fabric pieces and their placement is limited only by your imagination.  The one thing a crazy quilt is NOT is an organized and geometric placement of regularly shaped pieces of fabric.  Once the fabric pieces are stitched to the ground fabric, decorative threads including overdyes, rayons, metallics, silks and cottons are used to embellish the seams with virtually any embroidery stitch that you know.  Indeed, the surface embroidery is the focal point of crazy quilting.  In addition, silk ribbon embroidery, calligraphy, fabric painting, and photo transfers can personalize a crazy quilt.  Finally, laces, ribbons, buttons and appliqués can also be applied. 

Crazy quilts are backed with a decorative fabric but are not stuffed with batting.  They were frequently used as throws over the back of a sofa or on a piano and were meant as decoration and to show off the parlor to its best advantage with the needlework prowess of the Victorian woman.  Today crazy quilts are still decorative and are stitched as wall hangings, pillows, jewelry, Christmas stockings and wearable art.  And since this is The Sharp Needle column, crazy quilts are stitched with a sharp needle.

There are many excellent books on crazy quilting. Some that I especially like are:

The Crazy Quilt Handbook 2^nd Edition by Judith Baker Montano.

Elegant Stitches by Judith Baker Montano.

Floral Stitches by Judith Baker Montano.

The Treasury of Crazy Quilt Stitches by Carole Samples. 

A few  web sites that I thought were particularly good are:

http://www.caron-net.com/featurefiles/featmay.html

http://www.caron-net.com/classes/classmayfiles/clasmay1.html

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6531/

Copyright © 2002 by , used by permission.

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