What Makes a Crazy Quilt a Crazy Quilt?
By Merikay Waldvogel Crazy quilts with oddly shaped pieces and embroidered stitches in brightly colored silks, satins, and velvets burst on the scene about 1880. The exact date and origin is still debated, but they seem to have emerged just after the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. At that fair, art and needlework exhibits in the Japanese and British pavilions caught the attention of American artists and needle workers. It may have been coincidence, but soon after, American quilt makers broke with long-standing traditional quilt construction and design to make quilts with elaborate embroidery and block layouts that incorporated both the British needlework and a subtle Japanese design esthetic. Making crazy quilts soon became a craze. The origin of the name is also in dispute, but the style caught on quickly and spread like crazy. Thousands of crazy quilts were documented in state quilt projects. Based on crazy quilts with inscribed dates, the years 1880-1920 are considered
