Fabric Lessons: The Influence of Children & Youth
Young girls of 19th-century America were instructed in the craft of sewing at an early age. Though formal practice in stitching and needlework typically occurred between the ages of nine and fourteen, it would not have been uncommon to find girls even younger with samplers on their laps and needles in their hands. While some of this education would have been received in school, most of a girl's training would have happened in the home. Samplers and sewing lessons were intended to prepare girls for their futures as domestic housewives and for their eventual inclusion into larger textile projects, such as quilting bees.
For many young women in the early 1800s, these skills were put to quick use as they quilted covers and bedding for their new families. According to a 1952 edition of History News, a girl began making quilts for her future home as soon as she was old enough to sew. One tradition stated that the appropriate number of quilts in a young woman's personal collection was to be a baker's dozen with the thirteenth and final quilt only being started once a suitor had been selected and approved. The completed quilt top would serve as an engagement anouncement to friends and neighbors.
Related sections will include:
- "A Teenage Quiltmaker" - A young enslaved girl makes her mark on a Virginia plantation.
- "The Blackboard Quilt" - The stars inspire one quiltmaker to turn her talents into a lesson.
- "A Family Affair" - A husband and wife "compete" to make their family's best crib quilt.
[Bibliography: Ivey, Kim. "Schoolgirl Samplers and Embroidered Pictures." In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 23: Folk Art, edited by Carol Crown and Cheryl Rivers, 184-187. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013; "Quilting." History News 7, no. 4 (February 1952): 15-16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42652462.]
