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Charm Quilts
"Years ago my mother and her sister each started making a Charm Quilt. What the 'charm' was I've never known, but it was made of small hexagons, each of different material, no two alike. Grandmother's scrap bag was the principal source, but with 2,400 to 2,500 hexagons required, various relative contributed and scraps were exchanged with neighbors." 1. A type of quilt long neglected in the reporting of the history of quiltmaking in the United States is the charm quilt. It is a style of quilt so prevalent, yet perhaps so ordinary looking to the casual observer that it was easy to pass over as just another scrap quilt. Charm quilts are usually made with a single shape, such as a square, hexagon or diamond, and no two patches are cut from the same fabric. Charm quilts were most popular between 1860 and 1900, but there was a comeback of interest in the 1920s and 30s. It has only been in the past 20 years that this style of quiltmaking reached some stature. During the same time that charm quilts were becoming such a rage, there were other "charm collections" that were equally popular, if not more so. There were "charm bottles", for example, that were covered with beeswax in which was embedded buttons, mementos and small charms arrowheads or other "found" items. "Charm strings," another Victorian fad prevalent about 1860 to 1900, were made by collecting different buttons and putting them on a string. "When Mrs. McKee poured out the buttons on her kitchen table she said: "Art's mother and a friend collected these. It was kind of a fad when they was girls. You could have looked at them better when they was on the string. 'They were called charm strings,' she said. "They tried to get nine hundred and ninety-nine-all different, no two alike. I can't remember rightly now, but the buttons was to work some kind of charm."2. Young boys and girls have always enjoyed collecting things, whether it be buttons, fabric, baseball cards, stamps, coins, stickers or rocks. Part of the enjoyment is trading with friends, "oohing and aahing" over what someone else has, fingering the items, remembering where the different ones came from. It surely must have been the same with collecting the many fabrics for a charm quilt.
There was very little written about charm quilts. We can find a lot more information about the button collections. Perhaps it was because the buttons were considered more valuable than a mere scrap of fabric. Any written evidence that is found indicates that these "charm" fads were collected by young girls. And one of the superstitions was that if they collected 999 different patches or buttons, the 1000th piece of fabric or button would arrive on the shirt of their true love and they would live happily ever after. If a girl made the mistake of adding the 1000th piece or button, she would remain an old maid. That said, I have seen very few Charm Quilts that contain exactly 999 different fabrics. For charm quilts, the girls would gather and trade scraps of fabrics from friends and relatives. A set of sewn swatches (all different) found in an antique store had light and dark triangles neatly sewn together and stacks of the sewn pieces were tacked together in piles and atop each pile were little notes: "My eldest sister Jessie's dresses-3 sewed," "32 sewed-most of all of Aunt Ellen's." "Mama's dresses and waists-six sewed." Many of the 19th century charm quilts were random patches of different fabrics. In most, however, there was a definite attempt to create some type of overall design whether it was a simple light/dark placement of pieces or a more elaborate overall design. Many in my collection have radiating rings going out from the center of the quilt-a dark ring alternated with a light one. Today there has been a renewed interest in charm quilts. It is such fun to collect the fabrics, to trade and to just touch so many different prints. There are also so many different shapes to select from and once you have decided upon the shape, there are many different arrangements that can be used to put those shapes together. If you are interested in learning more about charm quilts, check your local library for "The Scrap Look" by Jinny Beyer, 1985 EPM Publications. It has been out of print for quite a number of years but you might be able to locate a copy. We off a selection of die cut 6" x 6" charm packs which include not only 50 different fabrics, many of which are no longer available, but templates for several single shape charm templates to get you started toward your 1000 piece quilt. Several of the quilts on our web site are Charm Quilts made up of all 150 fabrics in the Palette Fabric Collection. Mini Palette, Woven Palette Charm (spectrum 150) and Snow Birds are all Charm quilts... each piece a different fabric. Footnotes: |
