Ok, I swear this is the last post from me. I was really lucky to be born at the right time to have the handcraft revivals of the 1970s and the bicentennial and such after a crafty childhood of Camp Fire Girls and such things. I had the right hobby and the right skill set and I think very importantly, to have been in a hot bed of quilting at the right time in my life.
When I was in college, I wrote almost all of my papers on some aspect of quilting, or at least cotton. I have a pretty good detailed list of reasons on why it was uncomfortable people in drab clothing wanted the miracle fiber of cotton and thus the industrial age was born and the colonization era was firmly established -- cotton for comfort, spices for daily life improvement, and sugar for alcohol. Other people study oil exports or grain imports, I'm fascinated by fiber.
But anyway, I checked in Wikipedia, says Eleanor Burns first aired Quilt in a Day in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Burns
Sewing with Nancy started earlier, 1982. I don't remember a lot of quilting in the first years but I was still doing garment construction and costuming back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_with_Nancy