Last month, I wrote about the origins of the classic antique quilt pattern, Rocky Road To Kansas. While it sounds like a design dating back to the pioneer days of the 1850s, it actually hails from the late 1800s – definitely, after the railroad system had made travel less rocky to Kansas and beyond. It was most popular in the 1880s and ‘90s and on through the 1940s. While not a rare antique pattern, it is not very common.

I’ve long loved the large scale and scrappy purple Rocky Road to Kansas made by my great-grandmother, Isabelle Rogers, in the 1930s in rural Utah. She home-dyed cotton fabric salvaged, recycled, or upcycled from flour and sugar sacks for the purple background and the yellow backing fabric. You can’t go wrong with purple and bright yellow! She used muslin foundations as a base for her crazy piecing. Some of her triangle points have just two pieces and others have more than a dozen. This variety of piecing and different scale/size of pieces adds a lot of interest and character to the classic pattern. It is a great way to use scraps or leftover fabrics, but it is perfect for fun new fabrics, too.

Fast forward to March, when I needed to make a project for a quilt challenge. I jumped at the chance to recreate her quilt using a new collection of Island Batiks featuring blues and greens and the much-beloved purple in her honor. I love working in small scale, so I chose to remake her design using little three-inch block sections that join to make six-inch blocks. Quite a difference from her blocks that measure 15 inches. She pieced her blocks in strips and strings and random piecing, I followed printed paper foundations for my blocks. To make my version less formal and more folksy like the inspiration quilt, each block has four different units, placed in different positions. It was a joy to remake the quilt and honor my great-grandmother whom I never had the privilege of meeting. I feel like I always make a bond or connection with the original quilter when I recreate an antique or vintage work, and this one was extra special.

The modern quilting movement has focused on blocks with simple, clean lines and improvisational piecing, so the Rocky Road to Kansas fits right in.

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Quilt names : ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’,

It’s a quilt name that stirs up images of wagons full of bonneted prairie ladies busily sewing while bumping across the endless Western frontier. “The hardships endured by the sturdy pioneers were constantly in the minds of the early American quilters and inspired many (quilt) names. ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’, (all) have a great interest as they reveal to us the thoughts of our great-grandmothers over their quilting frames.” — Marie Webster, 1916. We now know this nostalgic image of wagons of quilters is simply charming fiction. The Kansas Quilt Documentation Project found no proof that “any pioneers taking the road to Kansas when it was truly rocky made (this) string quilt since the pattern appeared after railroads facilitated trips to Kansas.

The initial publication of a string-pieced Rocky Road to Kansas quilt pattern was not until the Ladies Art Company catalog in 1895. This was the first mail-order catalog of quilt blocks and included almost 300 patterns. Obviously, descriptive names like “X Block” and “String Star” are not dreamy and do not sell quilt patterns in the same way, so this romantic myth of “Quilts of The West” continues to roll on.

The main sections of the pattern involve easy sewing of strips, strings, or random pieces. But the background pieces were traditionally inset with Y seams, which can be tricky. Most quilters now split the background diamonds in half for simple piecing. For a more formal look, strip piecing can be used. One sews cut strips together and then slices the strip segments into four triangles or Vs for each block. Another name for this pattern is The Kite Block, first published in The Ohio Farmer (1897). It features four strip-pieced kites flying nose to nose (looking at the pattern from a different direction). I found a charming small-scale version of this pattern, circa 1890 from Lancaster County, PA, with red and Lancaster Blue centers, a yellow framing row, and a Double Pink background. This careful color placement and straight line or strip piecing in some areas help control what could be a very wild quilt.

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Those puffy, pillowy quilts from the 1970s are back and better than ever. Puff, pillow, biscuit, or bubble quilts are generally extra puffy or dimensional. There are myriad methods of making them. The big news is, they really can be fun and easy. I just made my first one along with my fellow Island Batik Fabric Brand Ambassadors.

The Puff Quilt Challenge

Each month we receive a creative quilting assignment, and for February 2023, we were to create a Puff quilt using a new fabric collection. Interestingly, out of 25 seasoned quilters, only three of the group had any experience making puff quilts, and for one quilter, that was 20 years ago. Many of us were a bit nervous of cutting and sewing a boatload of little puffy pillows, but we all created amazing puff quilts. While most of the group followed two standard methods, several quilters spurred by the challenge tweaked the standard or came up with their own methods. To see all 25 quilts, visit islandbatik.com/end-of-all-puffed-up-blog-hop

No Individual Pillows but Still Stuffed

Preeti Harris and I are both a bit rebellious and didn’t want to make lots of pillows, and didn’t like pleats or super puffiness. Preeti experimented and created her own no- pillow method. She sewed her top and then tacked batting to the back of every square. She added backing, machine quilted (stitched in the ditch), and bound her quilt. I found a no-pillow method in Sunset’s Quilting Patchwork & Applique (1981), which I improved by reducing the batting by 2/3rds by folding strips. I sewed a regular top and added a backing fabric without batting. The key is to stitch in the seam between your middle horizontal rows (if you have 12 rows, stitch between row six and seven) and then in all the vertical rows. This creates channels for stuffing, but that first seam means only reaching down half of the quilt. Stuff the row next to the center seam and stitch the row closed. Stuff the next row; repeat until all rows are done. Add a standard binding, turn the back to front, or add a facing. Suzy Webster cut and pieced a strippy top, added a back, and sewed in the seams to create tubes. She stuffed them with the aid of a dowel and sewed the edges closed.

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Everything old is new again. I blame A$AP Rocky (Mr. Rihanna) for the revival of the puff quilt. He wore a reworked vintage puff quilt on the red carpet at the Met Gala in September 2021 (recrafting done by Zak Foster). He combined two of the heydays of puff quilt, the 1970s/’80s and today into one garment. But seriously, puff quilts are super popular now and have a long though intermittent history as well.

What is a puff quilt?

A puff or biscuit or pillow quilt is generally composed of many individual little pleated and stuffed quilt squares that are joined to create a quilt. A lot of stuffing or batting is involved, and puffiness is a key to the design. These quilts are usually extra puffy and 3-D compared to regular quilts and tend to be an intense and tedious endeavor with lots of cutting and wrangling the super stuffed pieces. I have found an easier method. Much more on that in Part Two.

History

It is believed that the earliest version of the puff quilt was part of the fancy show quilt fad in the late 1880s and ‘90s (the era of the silk and satin crazy quilts). The stuffed quilts of that era, like their crazy quilt companions, were made of fancy silks, satins, and velvets and used to decorate pianos and table tops and pillows. They were made for ornamentation rather than to be used on beds. Quilt historian Barbara Brackman found that the oldest dated version of the Victorian era Biscuit quilts was a “Raised Patchwork” quilt, dated 1882. Also, during this time period there were gathered circle quilts called Suffolk Puffs made in England and Australia. Suffolk Puffs were sometimes filled with wool and so were similar to American puff quilts. Without the stuffing, they would be like the American yo-yo (gathered circle) quilt, which was popular in the 1920s-‘40s. Yo-yos and Suffolk Puff Quilts had a revival again in the 1970s and ‘80s along with another dimensional quilt style called Cathedral Windows.

True puff quilts were not seen much again until the 1960s and the quilting revival of the 1970s and into the 1980s. During this time, they were often packed with the newly available polyester stuffing, which was perfect for adding extra poof or volume. In that era, they were also filled with stockings/nylons as recycling and reusing was quite fashionable. Quilting fabrics weren’t easy to find then, and puff quilts were made with cotton, cotton/polyester blends, and even polyester double-knit fabrics. Many of these quilts were extremely heavy. Ruffles along the edges were popular, too.

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