Title: Amish Wedding Quilt

General Information

• Material Folklore
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Mary Fabio
• Date Collected: May 19, 2019

Informant Data

• Mary Fabio is a fifty-five-year-old doctor who lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was born and raised on Long Island, New York, and attended Dartmouth College. She married into a family with roots in rural Pennsylvania, in an area with considerable Amish influence. After meeting her future husband, she learned about the traditions of their town, where they owned a dairy farm. Many of the traditions have roots in Amish farming traditions meant to bring luck and prosperity to a farm.

Contextual Data

• Social Context
  • Mary encountered this piece of folklore shortly before her wedding. Her mother-in-law had organized friends and family of the couple to make squares for the quilt. Friends from college and work, her sister, her mother, and her in-laws all contributed squares for the quilt, all with memories from their relationships with each other.
  • The quilt served as a way for the couple to physically see the love and support of their friends before the wedding and to know that they would be there for them as they transitioned into life as a married couple, and eventually to a family.
• Cultural Context
  • This tradition has roots in Amish traditions of friendship and love for one’s neighbors. Also known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish people work as farmers in rural areas of Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. Amish culture emphasizes friendship among neighbors, because of the fickle nature of farming, everyone must rely on their neighbors at some point in their lives. Therefore, they placed strong importance on physical expressions of friendship, such as the wedding quilt. In Amish tradition, when a new couple was married, they would move to a new plot of land to begin their lives as farmers, and the wedding quilt symbolized that although they were moving to a new farm, they would always the support of their family and friends.
  • Since her soon-to-be husband’s family lived in a town with significant Amish influence, although they were not Amish themselves, they carried on many Amish traditions. Her mother-in-law had received a wedding quilt when she was married and passed the tradition on to Mary.

Item

• Shown here is the wedding quilt. It includes squares from her friends and family commemorating their bond together, as well as a square that was added later containing pieces of her bridesmaids’ dresses. Each square was handmade by a different person.
  • “A friendship quilt will bring luck and love to a marriage as each square is from a friend or family member that is looking out for the well-being of the newlyweds”

Collector: Jack Kurtz