North country quilts: an English tradition.

Except for the Lake District and York, the northern part of England is not a tourist mecca. Visitors to Britain often simply bypass the northern counties or at best have a fleeting glimpse of them on a journey between London and Edinburgh. Yet the region has a fascinating history of rural and industrial development into which have been sewn the threads of a strong quiltmaking tradition.

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The quilts made in this region are known as North Country quilts or (less precisely) as Durham quilts. Their particular distinctiveness lies in their quilting patterns, that is, in the patterns stitched through the layers of the quilt to hold them together and which give the quilt surface a subtle sculptured quality. In their basic construction, however, these quilts differ little from those made elsewhere in the Western world. They have a top, a back, and a layer of padding in between--known as "wadding" in Britain and more often as "batting" elsewhere. The three layers are stitched together with quilting stitches that, until very recently, were worked by hand. In order to quilt through the layers, the maker set them in a quilt frame, although the frame and precise techniques of "setting" varied from place to place.

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Two particular types of quilt have become closely associated with North Country quilting. The first is the whole-cloth quilt, for which only one fabric is used for the quilt top, although lengths of the fabric may be seamed together because bed-width fabric was simply not available until comparatively late in the twentieth century. The single fabric provided a perfect canvas for intricate quilting designs and showed the quilter's skill to perfection without any of the distractions of pieced or appliqued designs on the quilt top (Pl. I).

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The second quilt type is the so-called strippy quilt--a North Country dialect term used to describe a quilt worked in broad strips of contrasting fabrics. There is a clear parallel between strippy quilts and the bars quilts made by Amish communities in North America. Most commonly, just two fabrics were used for strippy quilts, and combinations of a color with white (such as red and white, pink and white, or green and white) became especially popular (see Pl. IX). Strippy quilts were made in other parts of Britain, but many more were made in the northern counties than in any other British region. Like whole-cloth quilts, they provided a canvas--albeit a more restricted one--on which to work intricate quilting designs. The usual arrangement was to stitch different patterns within each strip.