Crazy quilting: it's freedom!

Crazy quilters love the freedom that doing their own thing with even the tiniest scrap of ribbon or some satin from a much-loved dress...

One of my students, Margaret, is currently learning how to do crazy patchwork. She's making a quilt for a young girl with crazy patch corner blocks. (One of the blocks is shown in the photo.)

or foolishness?

Making-do was a catch phrase of old, but making-do with tiny scraps of fabrics and ribbons to produce quilts must surely be the height of foolishness.

But they are so pretty, and fascinating to explore in detail.

Women collected cigar ribbons to sew into the quilts, while many embroidered oriental motifs into the blocks.

quite elaborate work

Crazy patchwork is based on using many differing sized pieces of fabric scraps.

The seamstress applied the tiny pieces to a background foundation of fabric, each piece overlapping the previous one until the whole background was covered.

Often the fabric scraps were from evening gowns or lacy fabrics, and were prone to fraying. The ladies oversewed the seams with embroidery stitches to prevent the patches from fraying.

This made for quite beautiful patchwork, glistening jewel colours in shiny fabrics beside rich deep velvets.

I love the texture and richness of old crazy quilts.

good luck symbols of Victorian times

A spider web is often seen on old crazy quilts, with spider dangling on it somewhere.

Fans of all shapes and sizes are also frequently present.

Many quilts have beautiful floral embroideries on the blocks, and even the names of special people on them.

Cigar silks were sewn in, making shiny accents.

Museum of Appalachia, Norris, Tennessee

Photo from Wikipedia

stitched in lots of colourful threads

Ladies began to show off their embroidery skills while covering the seams with stitches, combining stitches together to make wonderful new stitch designs.

They used floss, silk thread, silk ribbon, wool...

• Herringbone
• Blanket
• Feather
• Wheat
• French knots
• Bullion roses
• Fly
• Chevron
• Cretan
• Chain
• Lazy daisy

Cream laces and satins, apricot silk ribbon flowers the same colour as her bouquet.

no seam embellishment

Modern style crazy patch is sewn by machine and needs no seam covering, as the seams are very strong.

By its nature, modern crazy patchwork is simple, unfussy.

I often use this as a background for the heavily machine-embroidered focal points, like the rosellas below.