Amish Quilts and the Welsh Connection by Dorothy Osler
I borrowed this book from the library after Wales and then Welsh quilts started started cropping up in my life. After the Today’s Quilter supplement, I found out that there might be Welsh influence in Amish quilts, so I started reading up on Welsh quilts.
This is a very academic book and had a lot of detailed references to sources as well as explanations of what the author concluded from the information in the sources. The scholarship is impressive.
As with many activities primarily done by women, research is difficult. “…they underscore the lack of value given to woolen quilts within the Welsh culture itself. The explanation for this is not simply that they were products of a folk culture… But quilts were made by women; they were domestic products for private space” (pg.53). This books has copious endnotes, a very detailed bibliography and an index. Many of the references come from letters, ships passenger lists, and data compiled from US census records.
There are few, if any diaries or journals discussing a connection (inspiration) between Welsh and Amish quilts. The author writes “…discussions have remained largely informal and, for the most part, have not been grounded in any evidence base beyond the visual evidence within the quilts themselves” (pg.131). “Particular equivalence was found in the spare style, intensity of color, and quilted textures of wool quilts made in nineteenth century Wales which–in terms of overall design, use of plain wool fabrics, and elaborate quilting styles–appeared to bear a striking resemblance to Pennsylvanian Amish quilts of a similar date”(pg.7). She goes on to say that questions about where a crossover could have occurred remain unresolved. “..at each stage in the research undertaken for this book, the accumulation of objective data from a multidisciplinary range of sources supported the subjective evidence contained within the quilts themselves”(pg.132-133). Osler is UK based and notes that further scholarship on the topic will have to be done in local historical societies and archives, in person, in the US.
There are similarities between the Amish and the Welsh such as religious non-conformism and farming. There is also geographic evidence showing possible interactions. The author says “It would seem extraordinarily coincidental that two quilt styles with such close visual connections developed entirely independently in the nineteenth century, when–at that point in time–the communities within which these styles were common practice lived in geographic proximity to each other” (pg.132). “Making quilts in deep-dyed plain cloth pieced into large geometric shapes of abstract form was undoubtedly practiced in Wales prior to the time that this dramatic style came into use for Amish quilts”(pg.132).
If you don’t want to wade through passenger lists and census records, read chapter 7, Tying the Threads. It summarizes the conclusions and leaves out a lot of the detail.
There are lovely color plates of Welsh and Amish quilts as well as a few pages of quilting designs.
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