Signature quilts

Region 1 (London and Middlesex) of The Quilters' Guild Of The British Isles is launching a fund-raising signature quilt at the Regional Day on Saturday. You pays your £1 and you signs your square, or rather half a square - the other half is a blue fabric, patterned or plain, that you supply. We're using a simple block, a plain cream signature triangle and the blue triangle, but these can be arranged in many ways. It would be so good to get all, or most, of the members of the Region to sign -- with 6" squares, think how big 200 or 250 squares would make the quilt!

I'm putting together a display about signature quilts, and this blog post is part of that. It's a way of showing lots of pictures, gleaned from the internet, in one convenient place. I was amazed at the many different blocks used in signature quilts (and of course some crazy quilts got signed too). Some examples come from the mid-19th century, others are modern - and indeed it's a tradition that is worth reviving.

One important reason for making signature quilts is as a statment of friendship, or as a memorial for leaving family or friends -

Or it could be a way of commemorating an event - an important birthday, as for this quilt (detail) signed by 450 family and friends -or this memento of a quilting symposium -

The fund raising could be for schools, churches, community groups - or for special projects, like restoring the home of the author of Anne of Green Gables -

The quilt might have hundreds of signatures and be raffled off - and then re-donated by the winners to be raffled again. They are also called subscription quilts: "A particularly effective means of raising funds is through the making of subscription quilts, a form in which individuals, businesses, and organizations pay a small amount of money for the privilege of having their name inscribed on a quilt in support of a particular local, national, or even international cause. When other avenues to engage in support for these causes were denied women, making subscription quilts proved an effective tool to demonstrate their convictions and to channel skills and energies that would make a difference in the causes they believed in."

Signature quilts can be personal projects too. They can be mementos of old friends left behind, and new ones made at the new home, as in this quilt that travelled from New York to Wisconsin in the 1840s -

or a project to get signatures of famous people in the 1970s -

Here's another spectacular example from the USA, begun in 1856 and made of silk -The signatures were often simply ink (which over time degraded the fabric), but sometimes they were embroidered over by the women putting the quilt together. They could consist of more than just names - sometimes, entire poems.

If you want to know more about signature quilts, this site talks about 19th century (American) quilts; Xenia Cord has written a longish essay here; and Laurette Carroll has written here. You'll see the patterns used include four-patch, mariner's compass, stars, pinwheels, floral applique...the possibilities are endless.