Crazy Quilts were the Victorian needlewoman's scrapbook. All her memories and mementos were put into fabric and thread and treasured for generations to come. The crazy quilt fad started in the late 1870's and continued until about 1900. Fabric pieces of random sizes and irregular shapes were stitched together to make a large decorative rectangle that covered the bed. The quilts were first called "Japanese patchwork," probably because they were inspired by some of the Oriental screen designs first seen at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. The quilts, often just tufted or stitched and not quilted, were made by "needlewomen" at home. Thousands of small pieces were used in each quilt. Some of the magazines of the day editorialized that making such complicated quilts was a waste of time and talent. To produce a colorful quilt with such various materials required many different types of fabric. Some were made from leftover dress fabrics. Many were made from boxes of silk, plush, or velvet remnants or ready-made embroidered squares that could be ordered from catalogs. The quilts were embellished with embroidery, beads, lace and many other creative things that could be put onto fabric. Traditional crazy quilt embroidery would never repeat a stitch pattern. So the embroidery was a big part of the quilt and a source of pride to the women. Modern crazy quilts are often made of scrap fabrics, often cotton rather than the elegant fabric scraps that were once used by the Victorian needlewomen.
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