Although signing and dating quilts is recommended today, that hasn’t always been the case. So how do we know how old a quilt is?

Family stories offer some information, such as “Great-grandma made this for Aunt Maude when she was a baby”, but such memories are often incomplete or even inaccurate. Two more tangible sources of clues are fabric and style.

Certain fabrics have only been available at certain times, and certain styles have gained and lost in popularity. But many quilters have fabric stashes accumulated over a long time, and they may have held on to a piece of fabric for many years before finding exactly the right quilt to use it in.

And styles may continue to be sewn long after their peak of popularity, whether because a quilter happens to like making that style, or first discovers it later on.

Condition is one way you might expect to date a quilt. But quilts don’t all get the same kind of wear and tear. The oldest quilts we see are often in surprisingly good condition, because they were kept for show. Utility quilts were used until they wore out and then they might become the batting for a new quilt. A baby quilt dragged around as a security blanket will be in wretched condition before the baby is 5 years old.

Some fabrics show their age. It may not be possible to assign them to a particular year, but old silks were infused with heavy metals that eventually cause them to fall apart in shreds (to “shatter”).

Just as fashion emphasizes particular colors in different eras, so do quilts. In part the differences reflect the dyes available. Early dyes were necessarily drawn from nature, mostly plants but also minerals and even insects. In 1856, synthetic dyes began to be developed, offering a wider range of colors to choose from. The dyes were not always colorfast, so that greens have become tan, or possibly blue or yellow. Fabrics dyed with colorfast “turkey red” often disintegrate, with streaks showing the white core as the outer layer of the fiber wears away.