by Carrie Schutrick

Created on: August 30, 2011

When talking about types of quilts, there are three broad categories to consider: the construction, the style, and the purpose.  Style is a topic rather too large for a quick overview article; purpose is a simple matter of whether the quilt is going to be used to provide warmth or if it’s meant as an art object.  So here we’ll concentrate on construction.

As a rule of thumb, a quilt is created by layering two or more pieces of fabric and sewing them together.  A modern quilt probably has three layers: the top, the batting, and the backing.  The top is the fancy piece meant to be seen, the back is usually plainer, and the batting is the filling in the sandwich that provides a little more warmth and heft.  Differences in quilt types mostly focus on how the top is constructed.

In a whole cloth quilt, both the top and the backing are plain pieces of cloth.  Such a quilt is decorated by sewing patterns and pictures through the layers, usually in thread that matches the color of the top.  The result is usually fairly subtle, at least from a distance, but rewards close examination, as the stitching can be extremely fine and intricate.  An elaboration of this construction  is Trapunto, in which padding of some sort is introduced into the spaces formed by adjacent lines of stitches.  Doing so produces a surface that can be almost sculptural in its texture.

An appliqué quilt is like whole-cloth in that large areas of the top are likely to be pieces of plain, unpieced cloth.  However, in appliqué the plain cloth is covered with extra pieces, cut out separately and sewn down.  The appliquéd pieces are sewn only to the top; when the quilt sandwich is put together for final assembly, the maker adds stitching through all the layers just as in a whole-cloth quilt.  Reverse appliqué uses layers of fabric, in which the top layers are cut away to reveal the ones beneath.

What most people these days think of as a “quilt” is patchwork.  In this construction, the top is made by cutting out pieces of different fabrics and sewing them together in patterns.  There are hundreds of traditional quilt blocks, and nearly as many ways of arranging them depending on the effect one wants.  One type of patchwork, called crazy quilting, involves sewing the pieces of fabric together in a more or less random fashion; such quilts are often heavily embellished with embroidery, ribbon, lace, beads, buttons, and whatever else the maker can manage to affix to them.

Finally, there are a few types that defy easy categorization, such as the pinwheel quilt, in which double-sided circles of fabric are sewn together with no batting or backing, or the cathedral windows style with its origami-like folding of fabric that creates a top and a backing at once.

Of course these types can be mixed.  For one thing, many quilts that aren’t whole-cloth still use the stitching that holds the layers together as decorative elements.  A mostly pieced top can include appliqué as accents, or top with large square of whole cloth in the center could have a pieced border.  It's just a matter of the effect the maker wants in the finished quilt.

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