Patchwork in history.

Please note: this is about patchwork, NOT about quilting.  In American parlance the two are synonymous but are not always so in Britain and certainly they started out as different skills.  Quilting is an ancient art used to increase warmth or armour protection; patchwork is a way to use up left over cloth.

The earliest literary suggestion of patchwork also refers to quilting, a counterpane of two sorts of silk in a checkerboard pattern, and embroidered about the edge. “quilt…of a check-board pattern of two sorts of silk cloth, well-made and rich…Around appears the new flower”appears in La Lai del Desire a French poem describing a bridal bed in the late 12th century.  It implies that the art was already known. 

It is possible that the concept of marrying more than one type of fabric with another came from the appliqué work brought back by crusaders from the Holy Land, and certainly the appliqué of heraldic devices and in church embroideries became common.  Subsequently the craze for particoloured clothing spread to the upper classes at least.  Some appliqué work may have been quilted in the Trapunto fashion, to raise just the applied shape, where a slit is cut behind the applied piece and wadding inserted, the small slit then sewn up. 

Etymological research into the word 'patch' gives some very interesting results: I use the excellent online etymological dictionary which if anything errs on the side of caution when I have cross referenced. 

Patch: 

[1] "piece of cloth used to mend another material," late 14c., of obscure origin, perhaps a variant of pece, pieche, from O.N.Fr. pieche (see piece, (n.)), or from an unrecorded Old English word

[2] "fool, clown," 1540s, perhaps from It. pazzo "fool," which is possibly from O.H.G. barzjan "to rave." Form perhaps influenced by folk etymology derivation from patch, (n.1), on notion of a fool's patched garb. But Buck says pazzo is originally euphemistic, and from L. patiens "suffering," in medical use, "the patient."

By Shakespeare's time the use of the word 'patch' for a fool was widespread enough for it to be applied as a description in Merchant of Venice regarding Laurence Gobbo; though particoloured clothes relating to the official fool or jester were usually called motley, remaining with Shakespeare in Twelfth Night the jester Feste declares that he wears not motley in his head - his foolery is his profession, he is no fool in his own thoughts.  Again in As you like it the quote 'Motley's the only wear' can be found.
However the official fools and their motley have earlier origins.
Camille Cognac, the acknowledged expert on crazy quilts,draws parallels with the Comedia del'arte of Venice's carnival, originating in 1162 as quoted by Cindy Brick author of Crazy Quilts - History - Techniques - Embroidery Motifs.   The characters include Harlequin, a magical faery character who is dressed in a multicoloured and patched costume, formalised in pattern later in history [and made famous by the Wedgewood figurines] . 'the patches could be remnants of other, richer clothes. Sometimes the colours on Harlequin's clothes are evenly divided....but on other occasions he appears in a suit of basted-together patches that look much like crazy patchwork'.

So it is established that patchwork in a crazy form and maybe more regular joining of simple shapes such as squares may go back in England to the 12th century; Celia Eddy, a British quilt historian also says, again establishing the differences between patchwork and quilting in the early years:

"As in most parts of the world, patchwork and quilting were originally two distinct techniques, serving both functional and decorative purposes. In poorer households, patchwork would have been an important way of prolonging the life of fabrics, which in pre-industrial days were labour-intensively produced in the home and would only have been discarded as a last resort. More affluent homes, as written records show, tended to own highly decorative quilts and quilted clothing which were partly designed to display the wealth and importance of their owners."

the first physical evidence we have of a patchwork coverlet is that of Anne Hathaway.  Anne Hathaway owned a counterpane made of odd shaped, and often long thin patches sewn down onto a base of some kind; from what I could see, the work had begun at one end and worked to the other, each piece overlapping the one before slightly.  As well as covering some edges this would also have the practical effect of increasing the layers.  Having myself  made crazy patchwork curtains with much overlapping, and holding the edges with herringbone stitch I can attest to the efficacy of the extra layers in keeping warmth in and cold out!   However such counterpanes could also prolong the life of thin sheets or blankets with adding the extra cloth and it seems reasonable to suppose that such use of scraps must have occurred to thrifty goodwives long before Anne Hathaway! 

Anne Hathaway's bedsteat at Shottery, Stratford-upon-Avon showing her crazy patchwork coverlet. From 'Creative Patchwork' by June Field

It is the transition from crazy patchwork, or sewn together squares etc to English style pieced patchwork which is hard to establish.

First, for the benefit of American readers I should perhaps define 'English Patchwork'.
This involves the cutting of paper shapes around which the fabric is folded and tacked, the folded edges to be sewn together with whip stitch.  The common shape is the hexagon, not a shape to be tackled without a template of paper to hold it together.

paper hexagon pinned to fabric in throes of being tacked on

several hexagons joined, showing paper holding those on the outside, and paper removed from middle hexagons

It is common practice now to remove the paper shapes once a hexagon is surrounded by others [and there are various techniques for dealing with the outermost edge when one gets there including the brute force one of taking all the paper out and treating the edge as an uneven edge to be seamed into a backing]; however this was not always the case, and the rag-heavy paper that was used remained in the garment or counterpane as an extra layer, also effectively adding a kind of quilting.

here's one I made earlier...

The earliest surviving geometric patchwork that can be reliable dated is the 1718 quilt found in 2000.  This is less geometric than the hexagon quilt though each piece, including the curved pieces, is pieced over paper and has appliqué as well; see it here.  Levens Hall in Cumbria claims a date of around 1708 for their quilted patchwork made from scraps of imported Indian chintz.  It is hard to prove the roots of the hexagon patchwork pattern.  The popular 'grandmother's garden' certainly dates to the late 18th century and the V&A actually produce a reproduction print of one dated 1797-1830 here.  Essentially a series of rosettes are made, each around a central hexagon, which are then joined with neutral coloured hexagons between to separate them into 'flowers' on a 'ground'.
Godey's Ladies' book published a hexagon pattern in 1830 when it was fashionable to do things in an English way, but it had been around already for a very long time. 

In Jane Austen's time the piecing of geometric shapes was well established tending towards hexagons or diamonds; with diamonds, larger and smaller pieces could be used so long as the larger diamonds had a precise geometric relation to the smaller ones such as the quilt made by Jane Austen and her mother with input from Cassandra.  More can be found  out about that here.  Her quilt has a trellis between the diamonds but this is not always necessary. 

A brief history of printing cloth from the Medieval to Jane Austen’s time

Pictures mostly  taken from ‘English Printed Textiles’, V&A

English Printed Textiles, 1720-1836

Block Printing

Cennino Cennini of Padua wrote a treatise on the ‘Method of painting cloths by means of using moulds’ early in the 15^th century.  The idea of painting cloths was already well established, as a cheap means to ape the expensively woven tapestries of the better off; bed curtains of the better off merchants were more likely to be painted than woven or embroidered.  This was the use of a wood block to print, and the method had been used in the Rhineland already for 300 years.

For furnishings it did not take long to apply glue instead of paint and powdered wool scattered on the glue aped voided velvets so popular in the early Renaissance.

These early printed cloths were not colour-fast and could not be washed as the colours would wash out.  Indian hand-painted cottons of the early 17^th century  that were colour-fast showed that it could be done; but it took until the 1670’s to perfect, either fairly simultaneously invented in France, Holland and England, or somebody had an excellent industrial espionage in place. 

A crimp was placed in the printing industry by a series of legislations to protect weavers of fancy cloths in the early 18^th century, prohibiting the printing of cotton cloth for home consumption, that was not to be removed until 1774. 

However despite this, the middle of the 18^th century  saw the invention of the copper plate for printing, which permitted a greater size and complexity of the repeats available. 

Even on block printed fabrics, the use of different mordants printed on to the fabric could produce very different colours.  

A mordant is a ‘tooth’ to cause a dye to bind to cloth, and different mordants can affect the precise colour the dye turns out. This effect was used by roller printing a design onto a cloth with more than one different mordants, the cloth then dyed as a piece and the way the dye reacted with each mordant making a pattern of variants on the dye.  One of the popular colours treated this way was drab, a brownish yellow through to yellowish brown made of quercitron, from oak bark [after 1783].   Madder is another colour to which this technique can be applied giving a range of colours of red-orange, chocolate brown, black and lavender and it was the Indian techniques using this that were introduced into Europe.  Other colours might be added by hand.

Note that dyes are largely vegetable or animal  up to the introduction of mineral dyes in the mid 18^th century – but more on dyes another time. For now a quote from the Household Cyclopaedia of 1881 shows that very little changed in broad:

Almost the only dye-stuffs employed by calico printers are indigo, madder, quercitron bark, or weld, ……… but weld is little used, except for delicate greenish yellows. The quercitron bark gives colors equally good; and is much cheaper and more convenient, not requiring so great a heat to fix it. Indigo, not requiring any mordant, is commonly applied at once, either by a block or by a pencil

The part removed mentions the coal tar colours of the great aniline revolution of the 1850’s

Block printed linen and cotton about 1750

printed in madder colours

Plate Printing

The first use of the engraved copper plate to print was in 1752 in Ireland, and rapidly spread.

The cheapest and easiest way to print was in monochrome, especially with the complexity that was available on an engraved copper plate where different densities of a colour might be achieved, generally either red or blue. Extra colours might be added with smaller wood blocks or by hand painting. The best known plate prints are the ‘toiles de Jouy’ from the works of Christopher-Philippe Oberkampf (1738-1815)

Early 19^th Century fabric printed at Jouy-en-Josas in France – this piece is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and more about it can be found at

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O112664/furnishing-fabric-the-attributes/?print=1#

English examples include mythological and theatrical themes, but peculiarly English are the designs with large flowers and birds, usually printed in one of the colours derived from madder [rich purple, red, or sepia] or in indigo, ‘china blue’ which chemical process remained an English monopoly throughout the 18^th century. Note these are furnishing fabrics not dress fabrics.
For designs the printers often  mixed and matched from disparate sources of other engravings without any seeming concern for the appropriateness of the mix.

Plate-printed cotton 1761 in red with scenes taken from disparate sources - pastoral scene from etching of 1652 by Nicholas Berchem, Peacock from engraving by Josephus Sympson 1740 after a painting by Marmaduke Craddock and stag and dog from 'animals of various species etc' by Francis Barlow.

Plate printed cotton about 1770. The original of the photo was in red but I have colourised it blue to give an impression of the indigo version which it was as likely to be as red.

Cloud

Another technique was to print a pattern onto the warp yarns so that when the fabric was woven it appeared misty.  This fabric was called ‘cloud’ or ‘clouded’ and Jane Austen makes a reference to it in one of her letters, speaking of yellow and white cloud. This example is a modern piece from my own collection of fabrics.

Roller printing of fabrics

See also

 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/txtn/hd_txtn.htm

As mentioned in my post about the new craze for cotton, roller printing enabled the familiar regency stripe that could also place a diagonal stripe on fabric.  Roller printing was developed in 1780 and one roller machine could print as much as twenty block printers. 

roller printed cotton about 1815. Original printed with indigo discharge and solid green; I've made a best guess. This one could well be a dress fabric

Roller printed cotton about 1820 in red

Roller printing is performed using a machine with a cast iron cylinder mounted on bearings beneath which an engraved copper cylinder picks up colour from a wooden roller revolving in a colour box, excess colour being stripped from it by a blade. The cast iron cylinder is a pressure cylinder to force the cloth onto the engraved copper, and is wrapped in a special material of wool and cotton lapping to allow for some give.  The copper cylinder contains one complete ‘repeat’ of the pattern so that when the fabric is passed through it, the whole length is duly printed.  In the earliest and simplest forms, for additional colours the fabric must be registered precisely onto the fabric; at first this was done by hand applied colour on block prints. Because of this, like the copper plate printing, much is monochrome.  

Later, not until after 1800, machines enabled other rollers bearing different colours; obviously the fewer the colours, the cheaper the cloth.  Block printing did not however disappear, since the size of the pattern repeat was governed by the practical size that a copper roller could be, and so larger designs were still printed by woodblock up to the middle of the 19^th century [dying out in time to be revived by William Morris].  Early roller prints could be no more than 16” for the repeat, the maximum practical circumference of the roller, whereas flat copper plates could be up to 45” square [Barbara Brackman ‘Clues in the Calico’ who does not, however know her diameter from her circumference.  Knew what she meant though.]

Clues in the Calico: A Guide to Identifying and Dating Antique Quilts

Colours used in the Regency and Georgian ers

Colours used in the Georgian period and Regency

 - and, when known, date of introduction or when particularly fashionable.  Otherwise I have noted when it was definitely in use.  ‘The Ladies’ Monthly Museum’ and ‘Ackermann’s Repository’ are to be referenced in this.  Also ‘The Creation of Colour in the 18^th century’ by Sarah Lowengard.  Some colours mentioned in Old Bailey online.

Thanks to Charles Bazalgette for making available his notes to extend this list.

The colours are broken up into the following sections; Reds/Pinks; Oranges/Yellows; Greens; Blues/Indigos; Violets; Browns; Neutrals
The swatches are as close as I can get....

REDS/PINKS

	Aurora	described as chilli coloured elsewhere; so a brownish orange-red from 1809
	Blossom	blossom coloured is a pale pink certainly in use in 1813
	Carmine	Dark pinkish red. First recorded as a colour 1523 popular in 18th century.
	Claret	Very dark, purplish red.
	Coquelicot	Poppy red, being the French name for the field poppy.  A bold colour and only to be used as trimming by young ladies. Height of fashion 1794-9 but used through the period; according to Austen in high fashion winter 1798-9
	Morone	Peony red 1811
	Pale Pink	One of the season’s colours of 1802
	Peach	what it says on the label.
	Pompadour aka Rose Pompadour	May have been named for the S. American bird the pompadore for its red-purple plumage rather than after La Pompadour. The colour name appears to have been used for a range of shades
	Rose	A rather dark reddish pink; between red and magenta, the colour of Rosa rugosa.  Used from 1382.
	Rose Pink	A pinker colour than rose, used from 1761.
	Turkey Red	Named for the place not the fowl.  Derived from Madder and is a cool bluish red. The name refers to a particular process of preparing the madder that took 3 weeks or more. Colourfast and will not fade. First practically produced in Europe [in Scotland] 1780’s.  Became particularly popular in the 1820’s

ORANGES & YELLOWS

	Apollo	Bright gold, 1823 onward
	Canary	A bright intense yellow [close to acid yellow]
	Evening Primrose	named for the flower, an American species, darker and richer than primrose. Height of fashion 1807-17 and just to be confusing usually referred to just as primrose.
	Jonquil	named for the wild daffodil; a very pure yellow. The must have colour of 1801
	Nankeen	A colour imitating the natural yellowish brown of the raw cotton woven into the cloth from Nanking also called nankeen. The name was used for a range of shades
	Orange	Certainly a colour mentioned for cloth
	Primrose	Named for the flower, a pale and delicate yellow. Height of fashion 1807-17
	Saffron	Between yellow and orange, the product of the saffron crocus
	Straw	golden beige, the colour of ripening corn, which is to say corn to make bread not sweetcorn.  A popular colour in 1802.

GREENS

	Bottle Green	probably what was later known as Rifle green; used in 1790’s
	Bronze Green	A very dark green with a blue tint.
	Corbeau coloured	A greenish black like a crow’s wing.     In use in 1790’s. Nearer black than green.
	Emerald Green	Also known as Scheele’s Green and unfortunately very poisonous because of being made with arsenic! This was popular because it did not fade. AKA Paris green,  Schweinfurth green, Imperial green, Vienna green.  Having been already very popular in wallpaper this became fashionable in fabric 1817
	Olive	dull olive coloured green
	Parrot Green	Dark yellow green 18th century
	Pomona Green	THE green of the Regency era.  Apple green by the name, but dark and rich. The rich bright green made by overdying yellow with blue [I hypothesise that this is what was in the Medieval era was known as Lincoln Green made by overdying weld or saffron with woad]. Name used from 1811/12 when it became fashionable
	Rifle Green	The very dark colour green worn by the rifle brigades. Not used until after 1800 when the Rifle Brigade was first formed.
	Saxon Green	Sage green.  Made similarly to Saxon Blue with the introduction of dyeing by fustic [a yellow dye].
	Spring [green]	A brighter more yellow shade of Pomona green. Name coined 1766

BLUES/INDIGOES

	Aetherial	Sky blue; name from 1820
	Azure	Bright blue, a blue-cyan, the colour of bright blue skies 1820
	Barbel	Sky blue 1820
	Celestial Blue	Name first used 1535; a light sky blue popular in early 1810’s
	Clarence	Another one described as sky blue, 1820
	Indigo	Dyed using the Indigo plant.  Dark blue, hint of purple
	Marie Louise	1812, Calamine blue, which is to say a slightly more turquoise colour than Robin’s egg blue. Bluer and lighter than turquoise, bluer and deeper than aqua
	Mazarine blue	A very deep colour, named for Cardinal Mazarin
	Mexican	Steel blue 1817.
	Prussian Blue	A dark blue with a touch of green to it
	Saxon Blue	A soft greyish-lavender tinged blue. Made by dissolving indigo in oil of vitriol [sulphuric acid] now mostly called smalt blue

                       

VIOLETS

	Damascen	Damson coloured, very dark purple
	Lavender	A pale greyish purple
	Lilac	Pale tone of violet; first used to describe colour 1775. Popular 1802
	Mulberry	A reddish purple, very very dark
	Princess Elizabeth	Soft pale blue with hint of lilac
	Puce	brownish reddish purple, the name is from the French for ‘flea’ and refers to the colour of coagulated blood inside that parasite.  In 1805 it was THE colour. Initially popularised by Marie Antoinette. Also popular in 1802
	Purple	probably a dullish purple rather than the bright colour we think of today.
	Violet	Blueish purple; used as colour name from 1370.  So synonymous with purple that Isaac Newton used it in describing the colours in the spectrum. Early use of the name seems to imply that it was a blue colour.
	Stifled Sigh	Aka soupir étouffe which according to Dr Johnson is the palest of lilacs 18th century.

BROWNS

	Cameleopard	French beige; more a light brown than a beige per se. 1825
	Carmelite	Dark brown, the colour of a Carmelite monk’s robe.
	Cinammon coloured	What it says on the label
	Devonshire Brown	Named for the notorious Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Regained popularity 1812. ? light tan brown
	Drab	Name dates from 1686. a yellowish brown on the browner side of nankeen; patterns in drab were often made by patterning the fabric with different mordants and overdying in one colour, whereat the different mordants produced different colour responses from the dye, but all toning. Nowadays called mode beige, a very dark beige.
	Dust of Ruins	Described as squirrel.  A drab tan then? 1822.  Possibly a colour akin to the reddish dust of the ruins at Karnak following on from all things Egyptian
	Egyptian Brown	Described as mace,the rich reddish brown used in Egyptian tomb paintings to depict  male skin colour, all things Egyptian becoming fashionable with the French ‘archaeology’ there.   1809
	Noiset[te]	Hazelnut coloured
	Paris mud	Colour designed by Marie Antoinette’s designer based on the colour of Parisian mud.
	Snuff coloured	What it says on the label
	Terre d’Egypte	Brick Red; 1823, possible a deeper shade of dust of ruins?

NEUTRALS

	Esterhazy	Silver grey
	Fawn	One of the season’s colours of 1802
	Iron grey	Dark grey, considered suitable for mourning as much as black [shown in mourning fashion plate]
	Isabella	Cream, first recorded use 1601 when referring to the colour of an animal’s coat as very pale cream; a pale palomino colour. Used for fabric in Queen Elizabeth I’s wardrobe.  AKA Isabelline
	Ivory	Off white with cream tint
	Russian Flame	Pale beige 1811
	Slate	Dark blueish grey; Pale slate is mentioned in describing a fashion plate 1811