Quilting Patterns

Still a work-in-progress, but I might as well post it.  Last winter I started hunting up all the pattern names/descriptions I could find for period quilting; that is, the motifs used for the actual quilting stitches, not the patchwork or applique designs.  Here are the ones from contemporary fiction:

"Oak Leaves" and "shells" are named in an 1859 story--"The Minister's Wooing"--in The Atlantic Monthly.

In, "My Economy Quilt" (The Lady's Repository 1860) , a grape leaf motif is used.

Vines in the border and diamonds in the body of a silk bridal quilt "Stray Leaves In An Old Journal" (The Literary Garland, 1850).

Octagon (hexagon?) patchwork in calico, quilted in "rectangles". Recollections of a Lifetime (1856)

(Note: hexagons tessellate with themselves, but octagons would require squares to fill the gaps).

Half-circles traced with chalk around a teacup form a "shell" motif, in Cedar Brook Stories (1864)

In another story, the young quilters are apparently working the corners of a quilt in "hearts and arrows", at their own initiative. "Judging From Appearances" (1855)

I think the description of a quilt as potentially "composed of stars or stripes, rising suns or crescents" refers to the patchwork, but it could also describe the quilting pattern. Clovernook.

A story in the American Agriculturalist (1847) has discussion about whether a quilt is to be quilted in "shells or diamonds, waves or feathers".

The American Girl's Book (1854) gives instructions for hexagon patchwork, with the finished piece quilted around the hexagons.

Quilting patterns in
Arthur's Illustrated Home Magazine
October, 1858. Page 154.