When Carrie Hall and Rose Kretsinger wrote in their 1935 aptly title book, The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America, that “the whole country is quilt conscious,” their observation extended beyond the great number of quilts being made, sold, and written about by colonial history enthusiasts and newspaper reporters alike. Quilts permeated realms outside the domestic spheres of needlework and home decorating. Americans understood quilts’ symbolic meaning, using the objects almost as a shorthand for “making do” amid trying times. By the 1930s, quilts were regularly used as a common metaphor, connoting the creation of something larger than the sum of its individual parts, even when those haphazard bits and pieces didn’t necessarily fit together neatly. Already the language of quilting was stitched into the American vernacular. A 1939 newspaper report on a New York Giants victory even referred to “a crazy quilt infield and a patchwork outfield.”