Women's Quilted Petticoats
Subject
Clothing and Dress
Title
Women's Quilted Petticoats
Date
18th and 19th Century
Description
The Historic Textile and Costume Collection contains fourteen 18th- and 19th- century quilted petticoats or parts. These petticoats represent the changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Most of the petticoats in the Collection have seams and quilting that is stitched by hand. The others have been made by machine in the early days of mass production.
Collection Items
Blue Silk Quilted Petticoat
This light blue petticoat is made from a silk outer fabric lined with wool and wool used for the batting. Three full widths of the silk were sewn together and pleated, along with the lining of a similar size, to a cotton waistband. Originally the…
Woman's Pictorial Quilted Petticoat
This petticoat, donated to URI by Winslow Ames in 1971, contributes to our understanding of quilting as an important element of a woman’s life in the 1700s. The technical ability of quilting found on this petticoat demonstrates a skilled hand at…
Woman's Quilted Petticoat
This brown silk petticoat originally was owned by Mary Perrin. Mary was born 14 September 1811, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts (Steere 2011). The silhouette of this petticoat, with a flatter front due to darts and cartridge pleated sides and back, as…
Woman's Calamanco Quilted Petticoat
The donors of this quilted petticoat suggested that it was “probably worn by Martha Cross Browning or her daughter Anne or Elizabeth Browning who lived in the Homestead, Matunuck, R. I.” Based on this information, it was assigned a date of 1840 to…
Woman's Imitation Marseilles Work Petticoat
This petticoat is an example of imitation Marseilles work. In the late eighteenth century, manufactured yard goods that resembled the prized, time consuming, and expensive hand-stitched Marseilles white work began to be produced and exported from…
Woman's Quilted Petticoat - Fragment
The petticoat has an odd configuration of fabrics, wool calamanco on the front and silk on the back. If petticoats contained silk at all at that time, the silk fabric was usually the face fabric and a wool fabric was the backing. If petticoats had a…