Quilt making using a frame is visible in the archive as early as 1300 in Britain. Quilted clothing, both in depiction and description, appears from the Middle Ages through to Tudor and Stuart England, and quilted textiles made in Britain remain extant from the mid-seventeenth century onward.
Evidence suggests that the skill of hand quilting in the frame was often carried out professionally in Georgian Britain, though women and girls also used frames at home to quilt petticoats and bed covers. The listing of quilt frames in inventories and wills suggests that the trade was widespread across the country, with examples ranging from the eastern counties to Devon and Cornwall, from Wales to the North East, and in Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man.
As the fashion for quilted clothing waned after 1790—and with the proliferation of printed cottons driving a popular trend for patchwork—quilting was often combined with intricate pieced work and appliqué on bed covers between 1790 and 1850. Quilting designs could be hand-marked by stitchers, professionally marked (or “stamped”), or purchased pre-stamped during this period. Pattern markers often also drew designs for embroidery and crewelwork, prior to the proliferation of Berlin woolwork.
Evidence indicates that rural homes, particularly in the West Country, the northern Pennines, and mid and west Wales—where farming was often combined with mining—were places where quilting as labour at the frame endured the longest. This persisted even as manufactured bed covers became increasingly common in urban and industrialised areas after the mid-nineteenth century.
Quilting as a paid industry continued in Wales, particularly between 1850 and 1900. Village quilters would either take in finished tops to be quilted or travel to farms, working at the frame for one or two weeks to complete a quilt. These women took on apprentices and were well known within their communities, though little known elsewhere.
In parts of Wales and northern England, farther from factory industry, a local, labouring, and vernacular practice of hand quilting at the frame continued between 1850 and 1920. This drew on the styles and techniques of eighteenth-century quilting and developed characteristic regional styles that incorporated both templated shapes and freeform motifs. Quilt making here remained closely tied to social practices—embedded in community life, neighbourly cooperation, and religious collaboration (particularly among nonconformists). Quilts were celebrated at country fairs, given as part of marriage and birth celebrations, and continued to hold significance as objects of matrilineal inheritance, usually gifted during the maker’s lifetime.
Around 1880 in Allenheads, Northumberland, entrepreneurial women revived quilt marking services using the postal system. Their designs influenced vernacular quilting in surrounding areas such as Weardale, Allendale, and the Tees and Tyne valleys, later spreading into the lowland coalfields of County Durham as mining families moved for work. Between 1880 and 1950, a distinctive style of wholecloth quilting endured—characterised by designs not delineated by borders.
At the same time, women began to use quilt making as a form of social support. Neighbours would contribute weekly to a fund managed by a quilter, who would then produce a quilt for each woman over the course of a year. These “quilt clubs” often supported families without a male breadwinner.
In 1921, the Rural Industries Bureau began investigating ways to support rural industry after the First World War. The 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent collapse of mining wages in Durham and South Wales led to a scheme to connect existing quilters and train new makers in these areas to produce work on commission for London buyers. Alongside this, several other commercial quilt-making schemes operated in Wales and the North, some continuing until the outbreak of war in 1939.
After 1945, quilting became increasingly associated with the Women’s Institute and was conceived more as a hobby than a trade. Makers were encouraged to produce smaller items, and the use of a hoop—rather than a frame—was considered more appropriate.
From 1972 onward, a revival of quilting in the United States around the bicentennial of independence had a significant influence in the UK. Television programmes, books, and local quilting groups helped spark a broader cultural interest in the craft, although this was largely shaped by American traditions. Elderly vernacular British quilters were celebrated within the newly formed quilting guilds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but as these women aged, the focus on frame quilting and its associated skills had nearly disappeared—until interest revived again more recently.
Today, a small and declining number of makers still use the traditional frame, often working in isolation. Some practitioners in their 80s and beyond form a living link to this heritage. Capturing their knowledge and skills is now time-sensitive and essential to passing on this unique tradition.
Quilt making is deeply embedded in a wide variety of social and cultural practices across Britain.
Historically, quilts were widely displayed at rural civic gatherings such as agricultural shows, fairs, and county exhibitions. Quilting was a competitive show category, highly prized and frequently covered in the local press. Travelling displays of exceptional quilts—often crafted by tailors as display pieces—could be tracked across the country during special events.
In regions like Northern Ireland and Northumberland, “quiltings” referred to community gatherings that often included traditional music and dance. These events are well documented in diaries, autobiographies, and local histories.
Wherever women’s social practices existed, quilt making was often present. It was common among women’s groups such as the Women’s Institute, the Townswomen’s Guilds, Temperance Groups, and even among male Masonic networks. Informal, undocumented networks—friendship circles, extended family groups, neighbourhood gatherings, and groups centred around children—also frequently engaged in collective quilt making. These hidden networks played an important but under-recognised role in community cohesion and women’s social organisation.
Quilt making had a long-standing presence in religious communities, particularly among non-conformist denominations such as Primitive Methodists and Welsh Chapels. Communal quilts were often produced for fundraising initiatives supporting war memorials, church buildings, and Methodist libraries. Quilts were also made as memorials for congregations—including autograph quilts—and were given as gifts or displayed during major religious and community events.
A lesser-known aspect of quilt history is the minority tradition of military men engaging in quilting. These quilts were displayed at army exhibitions and formed part of men’s competitive handicrafts at formal events.
Quilts have also appeared in popular music, traditional ballads, early film, and literature, often symbolising emotional connection, female heritage, and intergenerational care. In oral histories, quilts often mark key life events—birth, marriage, and death—and are presented as matrilineal heirlooms, symbolising familial continuity.
Quilt making is inherently emotional. Quilts were often commissioned or made to mark both personal and national events and were kept, gifted, inherited, and repaired across generations. They function as objects of both immediate sentiment and long-term cultural memory—embedded in what might be called the emotional landscape of British society.
Quilting as paid labour has long been associated with working-class, rural, provincial, and often marginalised women—many of whom supported themselves and their families without access to a male wage. These women were frequently limited by geography (remote rural locations), disability, ill health, or caring responsibilities (including widowhood, single parenthood due to desertion or death, or escaping domestic violence). Their apprentices were typically girls from similar backgrounds—often elder daughters or members of families experiencing economic insecurity.
Despite its invisibility within the domestic setting, quilting formed a female-dominated network of entrepreneurial labour. Recent research has begun to uncover the complexity and regional specificity of this hidden economy. This work is long overdue and provides empowering models of female enterprise relevant to today.
Religious quilt making flourished particularly within non-conformist communities, where group labour, moral reflection, and domestic industry were culturally encouraged. Needlework was often seen as a form of religious contemplation. Primitive Methodism and Welsh Chapel traditions are especially linked to quilting, due to overlaps in social class and religious culture.
Quilt making also had a strong connection to the temperance movement, where it was seen as a moral alternative to drinking. For both men and women, quilt making was promoted as a symbol of industriousness, domestic responsibility, and sobriety. This was particularly critical in communities where poor wages and exploitative labour conditions made preserving household income essential to survival.
While there is limited direct evidence of quilt making among travelling families, some secondary literature and artistic interpretations have made a connection between the thrift, reuse, and recycling practices of these communities and the patchwork tradition.
Key skills are in bold
Training and recruitment issues: There is no qualification which supports the use of these techniques, the City and Guild Patchwork and Quilting award does not include hand quilting in a frame and does not teach this tool. There are no current training opportunities which address the use of a frame.
Training and recruitment issues: There are some teachers within the hobby sector who teach rocking stitch, using a hoop as a more commercially viable tool. These teachers tend to be older, and classes are skewed toward the needs of other older hobby makers.
Training and recruitment issues: There are no detailed published sources of reference with instruction about using the frame.
Market issues: Amongst art and fashion practitioners there is an untapped opportunity for training and the procurement of frames as tools, which is emerging as part of a wider desire to access traditional hand work skills in quilt making.
et issues: There is a potential unmet market amongst homeware and high-end craft consumers for hand quilted British sourced objects. Some brands source hand stitched quilts made overseas. There is no equivalent market in high quality authentic quilted items as are seen with other heritage crafts because there has been no supply. There is no reason to suspect that a market could not be developed as more commercial and professional makers adopt these skills.
Market issues: In the US, hand quilters using a frame also supply hand quilting as a finishing service to hobby makers. There is no similar service available here but there is potential for it to be developed.
Supply of raw materials, allied materials and tools: There is at least one maker of quilt frames in the UK. Makers mostly rely on the uncertain market for antique frames, and on imported American frames (which are different to traditional British flat frames),or on finding someone with the skills to make one to order.
Supply of raw materials, allied materials and tools: Wool wadding is currently not available in the size needed for quilting. However, the group WoolKeepers has recently developed a British wool wadding product which is currently only available through the high-end craft supplier Merchant and Mills in a narrow width (for dressmakers), but which could be made more widely available to makers using frames (in an appropriate bed sized width) if more demand were available.
Ageing workforce: The last revival of the formal teaching of these skills ended in the 1950s. Some continued teaching occurred within WI organisation and local adult education from this cohort into the early 1980s. In the 1980s women trained in this way were awarded the MBE for services to the skill but their trainees are now also reaching the end of their careers. There is little evidence that these skills have been sufficiently passed down further to a new generation of makers through hobby channels, and so the chain is in danger of breaking without urgent redress and revival.
There are no formal providers of training but there are skilled practitioners teaching the rocking stitch.
Skilled makers, formally trained within the RIB tradition (retired):
Skilled/experienced makers working in a frame today (sideline to main income):
Skilled/experienced makers working in a frame today (hobby makers who do not professionally teach or exhibit)
Experienced and professional makers teaching or working rocking stitch but not in a frame:
Trainee/novice makers who are currently using a frame:
Museums/Collections with significant extant collections:
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