Patricia Ann

I come from a family of tie quilts I am wondering way all the quilting if you look at all the old quilts a lot of them were tie and also hand done with little quilting and also why aren't the quilts finish before you send them out to be quilted thanks

Butterflyblue

Fads and fashions come and go in quilting like anything else. Tied quilts are currently not very "in fashion" and so you see less of it. Heavy machine quilting is in fashion, so you see more of it. Either way makes a functional quilt, as long as the quilting/tying is close enough together for the batting used.

bj

I'm not sure why they were tied instead of quilted. I think a lot of the utilitarian quilts were made with scraps and it was probably cheaper to tie than use the thread to quilt a pattern in. The crazy quilts used the decorative stitching to quilt them, I think. As for not putting the binding on before you quilt it, that is because the quilting takes up some of the size of the quilt and you might get puckers around the edges? Some folks on here have said they've bound their quilts before quilting without problems, but they may have just been very lucky! I personally like tied quilts. I think it gives them an old-fashioned look and feel.

gaigai

A lot of the very old quilts (I have one from the turn of the century) from the northern part of the country, where it gets very cold, were filled with sheared wool. This made it too "dense" to quilt by hand, so it was tied. I suspect it was also much easier and faster to tie than to quilt by hand. And it may have been a personal preference.

atvrider

I love tied quilts, that's how I started. Machine and hand quilting scared me.

Jill

I've just started tying some of my quilts and I really like them that way. I guess because it reminds me of the quilts my mother and grandmother made when I was a child.

Sweeterthanwine

My mother always tied her quilts. She also did only paper piecing by hand. She didn't own a sewing machine until her later years. The quilts I still have of hers are all hand pieced and tied. I really treasure them.

cctx.

I've made a couple of tied quilts and they still look great too.
It's quicker than the standard technique of quilting.
From what I've heard, a tied quilt is warmer because the regular quilting sort of flattens the batting, while the tying technique does not flatten the batting, it makes it stay puffy.

clem55

I like tied quilts also. Have done a few of them in the past, and since I can't do much handwork anymore, I'll probably do more in the future.