Fifty years ago, no one bothered pairing the adjective Amish with the noun quilt. Few people outside Amish settlements knew there was anything distinct about the types of patchwork bedcovers Amish families kept folded in cedar chests or displayed on their guest beds. Yet in the intervening years, Amish quilts have shifted in status from obscurity to sought-after artworks. Amish women have been making quilts since the late 1800s, but only in the 1970s, when art enthusiasts began comparing Amish quilts to abstract modernist paintings, did Amish quilts become “cult objects.”