Back in the day, thrifty pioneer women crafted patchwork quilts out of scraps of excess fabric so as not to waste material. Over time, more and more artistry was thrown into the task, resulting in patchwork wonders of kaleidoscopic beauty.
Nowadays, though, patchwork designs are seeing the light of day not out of necessity, but because of a resurgent interest in these style of patterns. From floor-tile designs to high-end furniture, they've become downright trendy.
Take Montreal-based Periphere's Patchwork chair, which design duo Thien and My Ta Trung create by wrapping quilted upholstery remnants around a moulded high-density foam frame.
Recently, the brother-and-sister team rolled out a new line of accessibly priced furniture and accessories, which they are selling out of a new retail outlet on Montreal's St. Laurent Boulevard.Their popular Patchwork chair, however, belongs squarely in the studio's boutique category. Although its design is standardized, the fabric remnants are never laid out in the same way, meaning that no two chairs are alike. And the price reflects this - each one costs about $2,000.
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But it isn't just at Periphere that patchwork patterns have come of age. At Elte in Toronto, the upscale showroom's floor is, well, carpeted with high-end patchwork rugs, including vibrant Turkish-made models sewn together from fragments of other rugs.
And at Stylegarage on the city's Queen West strip, a patchwork pony rug by designer and co-owner David Podsiadlo offers a consciously contemporary take on the pattern.
"The impulse behind the piece was to play with a natural, organic material and remove it from the cowboy aesthetic it can evoke by incorporating it into a modern, architectural grid pattern," Stylegarage design associate Liz Wiegand says of the rug, which is made of cowhide.
"Refining the piece with details like the leather-bound edge and top-stitched seams made it even more accessible to customers who might never otherwise have considered a hide rug."
As such diverse designs reveal, there are no real limits to the forms that patchwork can take.
"Patchwork is a fantastic outlet for people who love textiles, patterns, texture and colour because it allows them to combine their love for all of these things," Kim Barrington, trend forecaster and creator of the popular Trendbites design blog (http://www.trendbites.com), says from St. Louis, Mo., where she oversees the Kimbro Agency, a strategic-marketing services company.
"What's nice, though, about the recent flood of interest in patchwork is that now there seems to be a choice [between] more traditional designs and the avant-garde. I have a patchwork quilt that is dated. The more recent crop of patchwork is less quilty and more creative with colour or pattern or both."
Of course, one of the most outlandish recent examples of patchwork was Louis Vuitton's $45,000 Tribute Patchwork bag, which consumers either loved (the limited-edition item was snapped up without ever hitting stores) or hated.
On the fashion runways, where the current passion for patchwork originated, its manifestation has tended toward that avant-garde side of the scale. In home decor, the expressions have been a little more restrained, leaning more toward elegant or whimsical than aggressively eye-popping.
This doesn't mean, though, that patchwork furnishings aren't dramatic.
"I am looking around for my 'statement' piece, which is the other interesting thing about patchwork - it can serve as that statement piece you need for your living room or guest room," Barrington says.
In other words, it ain't just for quilts any more.
