The explosive, kaleidoscopic look of the crazy quilt was made possible by
industrialization and technological advances. Late 19th-century textile manufacturers offered an astonishing assortment of sophisticated fabrics with a wide range of color and technical effects. The public loved these, and crazy quilt makers often worked hundreds of different fabrics into a single textile. The most sought-after pieces were silks and velvets, which implied luxury but were produced at this time at relatively low cost in American factories. The visual impact of the quilts was heightened by the way the fabrics reflected and played with light, resulting in an always-changing surface.
Cloth textures were also dizzyingly complex. Many of the novelty fabrics were
three-dimensional; plushes and velvets, especially, might have different pile heights, cut-away areas, or additional layers of pattern. There were also dimensional corduroys, damasks, and boucles; textured ribbons; fabrics with variegated, iridescent, shaded (“ombre”) and “watercolor” effects; and “fool-the-eye” designs. The exuberant stitches that typically covered the fabric joins were themselves worked in a range of colored and variegated yarns.
The new abundance of manufactured goods in the late 19th century—the sheer amount of available “stuff”—was also reflected in a new preoccupation with collecting. Crazy quilts functioned as textile scrapbooks, collections of appealing materials and of color, pattern, texture, imagery, stitches, and ornament. Some quilts were like autograph albums, featuring scraps with initials or signatures, either of friends and family or of celebrities. Others were made from fabrics that had been part of someone’s clothing, and functioned as souvenir albums of their lives.
