Part of quiltmaking’s popularity during the 1930s stemmed from the Colonial Revival—the architectural and home decorating movement inspired by romanticized perceptions of the American past. Fascination with the colonial past resulted in quiltmakers crafting hundreds of thousands of quilts. Some were adaptations of “old-fashioned quilts” based on the thousands of quilt patterns published in magazines and newspapers. Some were contemporary in design, inspired by entrepreneurs who sold patterns, blocks, kits, and completed quilts. And nascent quilt historians wrote book with romantic names such as Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (Webster, 1915), Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them (Finley, 1929), and The Romance of Patchwork Quilts in America (Kretsinger and Hall, 1935), in which they speculated on the origins of American quiltmaking traditions. These popular books celebrated the colonial practice of American quiltmaking, even if they had little evidence aside from the extant nineteenth-century quilts they collected or published pictures of in their books. Along with renewed enthusiasm for quilts and quiltmaking—called the “Rage of the Hour” in 1933—Americans embraced the values perceived to be embedded in quilts, including creative reuse, thrift, and self-sufficiency, the same values that had become so essential to surviving the Great Depression. For those of limited economic means, the American culture’s nostalgia for the craft of quiltmaking, embodying both an adaptation of an imagined colonial style and ideals of fortitude and frugality, made particularly good sense.