Homemade quilts combine the warmth of a bed cover with a unique story told by the quilters from Lancaster County, PA. Every homemade quilt is as unique as the family, busy mother or Amish ladies group who uses a needle and thimble to thread stitch on the quilt. Some quilts involve hundreds of hours and thousands of stitches to create a unique patchwork quilt that will last for generations.
When you peruse our HOMEMADE QUILTS you are shopping for an item that tells a story and adds meaning to your bedroom! Discover more about our unique patchwork quilts and the stories behind them…
We have a lot of quilts! Want to see a gallery of the major patterns? Checkout our Common Amish Quilt Patterns.
Quilters didn’t create the Bargello motif; it was first found in needlepoint embroidery, on the upholstered chairs from the Bargello palace in Florence, Italy, dating from the 17th century. With this origin, the pattern has variously been called the Bargello stitch and the Florentine stitch. It’s even called the Hungarian point, since there is evidence that Hungarian royalty, including Queen Maria Theresa, also practiced this art.
Traditionally, Bargello Quilt’s embroidery is sewn with wool thread on canvas, using mathematical patterns of stepped vertical stitches. Quilters adapted these patterns, sewing together long strips of material and cutting them crosswise to make lines of blocks, then offsetting the rows to each other. Cutting narrow strips and setting them in steep stair-steps creates the fiery, sharp points on the Bargello Flame quilts; cutting wide strips and placing them in gradual stair-steps produces the flowing waves of the Surf Song quilts.
By now, the Bargello Quilts pattern has morphed into many different variations–the criss-crossing weave of the Mystic Night pattern, the flowing hearts of the Love Within pattern, the interlocking diamonds of the Argyle pattern, and the joined hearts of the Linking Hearts pattern.
Called a “charm” quilt in the late 19th century, young women collected hundreds of different fabrics from their family and friends. Perhaps if they collected 999 different squares, their true love would bring them the thousandth–and their happily-ever-after dream, too. One quilting blogger speculates that collecting these fabrics may have given girls opportunities to ask their love interest for a contribution!
The scrap quilt has also been called a “beggar” quilt, referring to quilters asking each other for contributions to their projects. Trying to put together a bedspread without repeating every fabric, they also called the quilts “odd feller” quilts–every piece was an odd feller. Some families recall their mother repeating one square, however, so that a child sick in bed might be entertained looking for the matching patches.
Still another name scrap quilts went by is the “postage stamp” quilt, so called because quilters would use their tiniest scraps, sometimes no bigger than a postage stamp. Perhaps the original motivation was not wasting the smallest piece (historians recall the scarcity of the Great Depression in this), but it also became a challenge at some point. Quilters would collect thousands of pieces to compete with each other in making stitched masterpieces.
The term handmade is commonly used to describe crafts produced by an artisan rather than a manufacturing facility. Since it is not mass-produced, each handmade quilt is special. However, not all the stitching in a hand-made quilt is done manually. Just as the woodcrafter makes use of mechanical tools to create his workmanship, our seamstresses make use of various devices to craft these quilts. The seamstress cuts her pieces with a rotary knife and sew them with each other on the stitching machine. The quilter functions with only thimble, thread, as well as needle to quilt numerous tiny stitches throughout the quilt. Handmade is a gift: it is the gift of time and also skill to develop an item distinctly for you.