Mid blue strips alternating with strips pieced from small multicoloured rectangles

Blue Pieced strippy quilt

For this strippy quilt, instead of simply alternating strips of two fabrics, the maker chose to alternate a spotty mid-blue fabric with pieced strips made of many small rectangles.

Strips of multicoloured pastel fabrics stitched together into strips, alternating with blue strips
Blue Pieced Strippy quilt

Printed fabrics

Fabrics in such basic design motifs as stripes and polka dots are not easy to date, and unfortunately this quilt came with no provenance other than having probably been bought in Edinburgh by the previous owner. However, the colours and style of the prints are typical of those made between 1890 and 1920, so it is likely that the quilt dates from this period.

The fabrics in the pieced strips may have come from sample books, as the same design often appears in several colourways.

For example, look at the blue striped fabric at the centre of this section:

Various light coloured rectangles stitched together
Pieced rectangles

The same fabric in a different colourway can be seen near the bottom of this section:

The red/pink fabric on the bottom left above with the angular branched motif is found in maroon on beige at the bottom of the section below:

And also in blue in the top right of this section:

A broad multistripe fabric also appears in more than one of the above sections in different colours – can you spot it?

Quilting designs

Some lovely quilting designs are used along the strips.

The most noticeable are the parallel sets of waving lines which curve backwards and forwards across the blue strips – these are sometimes known as  “worms”.

There are two versions of the infills around the waving lines; on four strips,  clamshells fill the half circles, whereas in the other two, the space is filled with a spray.

Large waving lines of stitching flow along the blue fabric strip
Around the seven stranded wave, clamshell fillings face into the centre of the strip.
Large waving lines of stitching flow along the blue fabric strip, with a spray infill
This version of the wave has nine strands. A spray design is used as the infill this time.

The quilting designs on the pieced strips are harder to see on the front, so this photo show the back of the quilt:

The variety of quilting designs show better on the white cotton reverse side.

Now it can be seen that four of the pieced strips have a quilted cable design

Look at the photo of a pieced strip below- can you pick out the quilting?
Twisted rope quilting design on multicoloured strips
Most of the pieced strips have a cable quilting design

The central pieced strip has a different quilting design.

Alternating fans and trefoils
Fans and trefoils alternate in a deceptively simple way
Alternating fans and trefoils quilted over multicoloured patchwork
This quilting design is quite difficult to pick out over the patchwork.

If you are interested in this type of quilts, have a look at others on the Strippy Quilt pages

If you would like to know more about cables, have a look at the Drafting Cable Borders page, where you can discover more about the pack available in my online Shop which teaches you how to draft these yourself.