North country quilts: an English tradition

Magazine Antiques, June, 2001 by Dorothy Osler

Except for the Lake District and York, the northern part of England is not a tourist mecca. Visitors to Britain often simply bypass the northern counties or at best have a fleeting glimpse of them on a journey between London and Edinburgh. Yet the region has a fascinating history of rural and industrial development into which have been sewn the threads of a strong quiltmaking tradition.

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The quilts made in this region are known as North Country quilts or (less precisely) as Durham quilts. Their particular distinctiveness lies in their quilting patterns, that is, in the patterns stitched through the layers of the quilt to hold them together and which give the quilt surface a subtle sculptured quality. In their basic construction, however, these quilts differ little from those made elsewhere in the Western world. They have a top, a back, and a layer of padding in between--known as "wadding" in Britain and more often as "batting" elsewhere. The three layers are stitched together with quilting stitches that, until very recently, were worked by hand. In order to quilt through the layers, the maker set them in a quilt frame, although the frame and precise techniques of "setting" varied from place to place.

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Two particular types of quilt have become closely associated with North Country quilting. The first is the whole-cloth quilt, for which only one fabric is used for the quilt top, although lengths of the fabric may be seamed together because bed-width fabric was simply not available until comparatively late in the twentieth century. The single fabric provided a perfect canvas for intricate quilting designs and showed the quilter's skill to perfection without any of the distractions of pieced or appliqued designs on the quilt top (Pl. I).

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The second quilt type is the so-called strippy quilt--a North Country dialect term used to describe a quilt worked in broad strips of contrasting fabrics. There is a clear parallel between strippy quilts and the bars quilts made by Amish communities in North America. Most commonly, just two fabrics were used for strippy quilts, and combinations of a color with white (such as red and white, pink and white, or green and white) became especially popular (see Pl. IX). Strippy quilts were made in other parts of Britain, but many more were made in the northern counties than in any other British region. Like whole-cloth quilts, they provided a canvas--albeit a more restricted one--on which to work intricate quilting designs. The usual arrangement was to stitch different patterns within each strip.

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Although whole-cloth and strippy quilts have come to be regarded as quintessentially North Country quilt types, it was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they became dominant there. Until that point, pieced and appliqued quilts of various kinds had predominated in North Country quilting, just as they had in other parts of the world where quilting was a common domestic practice. It is the patterns quilted onto all these quilt types that identify them as North Country work and give them their particular quality. The "library" of North Country patterns was not large; for the most part it consisted of curvilinear shapes with fluid, often scalloped, outlines (see Pl. VII). Many motifs were based on stylized leaves, flowers, and feathers. Especially popular were feather and rose motifs, used either individually or in combinations to form border patterns. Twisting cables, plaits, crescents, wavy lines, and ovals were also used in borders. One of the classic North Country border patterns is a simple combination of overlapping ovals, central roses, and curved lines called the Weardale Chain (see Pls. VII [no. 1] and IX). The sinuous quality these designs give to a quilt top shows to best effect on the plainer surfaces of whole-cloth and strippy quilts, uninterrupted by piecing and appliques. The interesting questions are just how and why did North Country quilters develop these new directions at a time when the art was beginning to lose its vigor in most other parts of Britain.

To find the seeds of North Country quilting we must look back to the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century. Up to then, quilting had been largely a professional trade concentrated in London, which produced fashionable items of high status, such as petticoats and other personal clothing, quilts, and domestic furnishings. Making pieced and appliqued bedcovers were domestic pursuits largely restricted to genteel ladies of leisure who crafted intricate coverlets of silk or Indian chintz. The industrial revolution, with its roots in northern England, brought inexpensive fabrics within the reach of those of more modest means and from the late eighteenth century onwards, stimulated an increase in domestic quiltmaking using cotton materials. The situation was mirrored in North America, for technological innovations in cloth manufacture and printing traveled both east to west and west to east across the Atlantic Ocean.