a quilter and before I knew it I was enlisted in helping them figure
out what batting was, how to use it, how much to buy and all the rest.
The entire time the woman's husband was going on about the quilting
his grandmother did, telling me how they didn't have all the latest
gadgets and how it took her 5 years to make a quilt. I understood
he was paying his grandmother a compliment so just nodded and smiled
but I started thinking about that and for some reason he thought like
many do, that the only quilting that counts is that which is done with
a hand needle and thread. ( It's not the first time I've run into
such a stance.)
*I* started thinking about that and while searching online tonight
found a wonderful site with a lot of quilting history on it.
In particular the site owner, a retired school teacher, has done
an awful lot of research into a great number of quilting areas
including a section on quilting myths that I found fairly entertaining
and very interesting so I thought I'd share it with ya'll.
Here is the entire site:
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this is the section of myths that happened to coincide with myrecent experience. By no means do I personally think either wayis superior but after reading this I realized what she says heremakes a lot of sense and gives me a better idea of when that ideaof one way over the other took root.
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"When the sewing machine became available the possession of one was quite a
status symbol. Piecing was often done by sewing machine and a few women
even machine stitched their quilting or appliqué. Considering how much
harder it must have been to do this compared to using modern sewing
machines it certainly wasn't out of laziness but because of a desire to use
the sewing machine. These visible stitches advertised that the quilter was
a proud owner of a sewing machine. Sewing the binding by machine was
another way to show off machine stitching.
During the Colonial Revival around the turn of the last century hand
quilting was valued more but this was a part of a movement toward going
back to fine handcrafts. During the earlier years when the sewing machine
was first available we do not find that most people considered hand piecing
and quilting to be the superior method."
At any rate I hope some of you find the site interesting!