Quilt making may appear to be recession hobby but quilts are a  personal treasures at any time.

Quilts are warm and comforting when temperatures dip and economies dive.

Country-style furnishings – especially quilts – are fashionable this autumn according to the home decor media. People often reassess their priorities during times of financial uncertainty, and as a result, embrace leisure activities such as crafts because they provide gratification like little else.

In truth though, the appeal of quilts has never diminished. These vestiges of our pioneer past have changed over time and with new technology, yet stayed distinctly rustic. As a hobby, quilting is a big business but quilts themselves have remained personal items.

A quilt is a bed covering of batting sandwiched between two layers of fabric. The top layer has pieces arranged in patterns with bucolic names like Log Cabin, Bear’s Paw, Churn Dash, Straight Furrows, Flying Geese, and Harvest Sun. The bottom is plainer cloth and the two are joined by “quilting” on a frame.

Quilts are products of their time.

Early quilts of Upper Canada were made of loose wool covered by handmade cloth; crazy quilts of velvet and silk were popular during the 1880s; bright prints followed the introduction of colourfast dyes; bleached, sugar bags were used in the Depression; barkcloth was a fad in the 1950s; and garish, geometric patterns characterize the 1960s.

Pioneer women made quilts to keep people warm but they also expressed their creativity in patterns and colours, showcased their sewing skills, cultivated friendships, and brightened their plain farmhouses. Most quilts were made from fabric scraps: unworn areas of clothing such as shirttails and skirt hems. Quilt patterns utilized small pieces because a well-worn garment yielded more salvageable two-inch pieces than twelve inch ones. Today most quilts are made from new, matching fabric pieces, not old scraps.

Rising prosperity in the twentieth century, widespread use of central heating, and women’s broad participation in the labour force could have lead to the decline of quilting, but did not. Quilts changed from items of thrift and necessity to products of leisure activity and affluence. Many quilt historians credit a quilt show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 as a pivotal point when the perception of quilts changed from utilitarian craft to art form. Also, some activists in concurrent forces of social change, specifically the Women’s Movement and back-to-the-land trend, championed the labour, skill, and artistry involved in quilts.

In the 1980s technological advances changed the construction of quilts.

Long-arm quilting machines, tiltable tables, rotary cutters, mats, and rulers enabled quilters to produce bed coverings in a time-honoured tradition with time-saving equipment. Not long ago, the Internet opened up networks of goods, services, and information.

As quilting blossomed as a leisure activity, similar to golf or fishing, it generated spinoffs. There are bed and breakfast lodgings that cater to quilters, annual quilt shows that attract thousands of visitors, numerous web-sites, and regional quilt guilds. Novels such as Jennifer Chiaverini’s The Elm Creek Quilt series are set in the world of quilting, and murder mysteries such as those penned by Jill Paton Walsh have the solution hidden in intricate quilt patterns.

Our grandmothers and great grandmothers undoubtedly never expected their quilts to become family heirlooms or collectibles. They intended them to cover familial beds for years, then the hired man’s cot, and finally garden plants under threat of early frost. They could not know that their gay patchwork would stitch us to a rural past.