A Bit of Yoyo History

 With this pandemic, it has been hard for our quilt guild to get speakers to come to our meetings.  So we have been relying on our members to step in.  If you want to know the truth, I have actually enjoyed their talks and workshops more than well known quilt teachers and I am not just saying that because I will be the guild speaker in August.

To some members of my guild I am known as the Yoyo Queen. I have mentioned before in this blog that I love making and using yoyos.  So I am going to tell the guild a bit of history about yoyos and all the way I (and so they) can use them.  And I thought to practice a little, I might share my talk with you. 

Yoyo quilts tend to be controversial.  Why?   ‘Technically’ they are not quilts. They don’t have batting, they don’t have a backing and there are no layers that are quilted together.  But because they often cover a bed, they are usually found in discussion of quilts.

So instead they are known as coverlets. Ladies in the past would use them as a summer bedspread.  They would cover their beds with a top sheet and then put the yoyo quilt over the sheet.  With the sheet showing between the yoyos, it gave it a light, airy look and feel.  And usually at night they would fold up the yoyo quilt before going to bed so you didn’t really cover up with this type of quilt.

The technique of making yoyos came around the late 1800s also known as the Victorian age.  In England they were first thought to be made in the 1600s.  They became a fad in the 1920s to 1940s partly because they were easy to carry around and sew.

They have been known as rosettes, puffs (that is what they were called in England.  Suffolk Puffs to be exact after the county in which they were first thought to be made) and one source I read said they were also called Marguerites (don’t know why that name except that there is a daisy with that name and maybe the yoyo looked like the center of the daisy.).  Since they became popular in the 1920s when the toy yoyo became popular, it is thought that these fabric circles received the name Yoyo because they looked like the round toy.  We may actually never know about their name.

Most yoyo quilts were just like patchwork quilts one yoyo next to each other with no pattern or color scheme.  

But sometimes they resembled what we thought of as quilt designs.  They had ‘blocks’ of maybe 5 yoyos by 5 yoyos with a row of a solid you around it like a lattice strip. 

 

And I have seen some where the ‘block’ were put on point to give it a diamond look with the edges scalloped giving it a zigzag look.  So even if you don’t consider a yoyo quilt as a quilt, it can look like a quilt in its design.

©2021 Cheryl Fillion