Quilt Museum and Gallery, York

St Anthony's Hall in York is one of the city's finest medieval spaces, all carved oak bosses and beams. Above your head flies the saint's emblem, a splendid pig.

The building has been used for many things down the centuries: as a hospital, workhouse, and school for the poor. Until recently it was used by archivists, and now, thanks to the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles, it is a museum.

The guild, which has a medieval ring about it, was in fact formed in 1979. It boasts 7,000 members, who have long-wanted to open a museum to display their historic collection and sell their latest creations.

That ambition has at last been realised after a seven-year-long search for a suitable home. In June the Quilt Museum and Gallery opened its doors in a space recently restored by the York Conservation Trust.

The museum opened with an exhibition that traces quiltings' "journey from bed to wall", in other words, from a comfort when homes were draughty to contemporary works of art. In Quilts in Time there are 40 examples on show, half drawn from the guild's own collection of over 600 pieces, the rest on loan from contemporary makers.

The oldest are the most interesting. One dates from the early 18th century; made of silk, it occupies a separate low-lit space alongside the Pawn Broker's Crazy Coverlet, which earned its name after it was discovered in a London pawn shop. Made by recycling silks and velvets in 1877, its maker - and its reasons for pawning - are mysteries.

We know something more about another late 19th-century quilt on show, Elizabeth Watson's appropriately named Kaleidoscope. She and her sister lived in Cumbria. Both were prolific quilters and seamstresses, earning money by making functional pieces for local farm labourers' families.

Kaleidoscope was made for Watson's own use and kept in the bottom drawer. It never emerged to warm her marital bed as she died a spinster.

A remarkable quilt made by a Victorian soldier, a veteran of the Crimean war, shows that men as well as women expressed themselves in thread. Using bits of his uniform, it demonstrates that a skill with a needle was a matter of life and death for those who spent freezing winters besieging Sebastopol.

"Cutting the Carbs - Applying the lbs" celebrates a different kind of heroism. "[It is] an homage to brave dieters everywhere," says its maker, Bethan Ash. The quilt proclaims a weakness for cake, chocolate and sweets in a clash of colours and zigzags.

The museum's policy to mount changing exhibitions is sensible, given the sensitive nature of textiles, which can be admired on open display, and the need to attract repeat visitors in a city packed with tourist attractions.

That said, it is a shame there is not room for a more permanent display that gives a brief history of quilting in Britain, America and beyond. How did they become more than bed coverings, intimate celebrations of births, marriages, patriotism and a source of solace in times of sorrow?

The second temporary exhibition is proof of the guild's determination to look beyond the British Isles. Opening in the autumn, Quilts in Common will include works from the US and Africa. The York museum is working with the International Quilt Study Center in Nebraska, which has also opened a museum this year.

The museum acknowledges the debt to American collectors and museums in raising quilting to the status of an art form and a subject of scholarship. The Whitney Museum's 1971 show, Abstract Design in American Quilts, is cited as a turning point among quilters. It will be interesting to see the effect of the forthcoming show of quilts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2010.

One drawback is that the new museum stresses quilting as an art form to the detriment of the social history. As well as a lack of narrative history - how the industrial revolution resulted in cheap fabrics that creative quilters were quick to exploit - there is little to touch or do in the museum.

Unlike the history of quilting, the history of the hall is provided in rather too much detail. There are several closely worded fact sheets and the guild's laminator must be on its last legs.

Being housed in a Grade-I listed building imposes limitations, which, to its credit, the guild seems happy to work with. A new lift and staircase provide access to the great hall on the building's first floor.

The museum makes a statement about the guild and its ambition. This is a rare thing to do. It persevered when all around St Anthony's Hall things were going awry.

There was trouble with the builders: at the last minute York Conservation Trust's contractors went bust, leaving the job unfinished. So a sensory garden will have to wait until next spring, and it will be a while before the cafe serves its first cakes. There will also be studios for artists.

Textiles run through the history of St Anthony's Hall. Weaving was among the main chores for inmates when it was a workhouse, and when a school, children learned the useful skills of knitting and sewing. The patron saint of sewing is St Anne - may she smile kindly on the guild's hard work.

Caroline Worthington is the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, London