True Blue or Prairie Queen

Sorting my nine-patch pictures I came across this vintage quilt in BlockBase pattern #1656

The pattern was published with two names, the first in the magazine Hearth and Home

in the first decades of the 20th century. I shaded the block in BlockBase as I found it in Ruth Finley's book.

http://nancycabotsewalong.blogspot.com/2013/02/prairie-queen-quilt-block.html

Early 20th-century top quilted in the late 20th-century.

Connecticut project & the Quilt Index

In her 1929 book Old Patchwork Quilts and The Women Who Made Them, Finley classed it with several "Simple but widely used nine-patches that every person interested in quilts should know..." Readers (like me) inferred that the pattern was decades old but I doubt that now. It probably originated with Hearth and Home and was popularized by Finley's book. I love the neat little block sketches in Finley's book, but I think the shading is wrong in #42 Prairie Queen.

It should be more symmetrical.

When the Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune copied the pattern in 1933

the shading was just like Finley's.

See a shading discussion here at Moore About Nancy:

http://nancycabotsewalong.blogspot.com/2013/02/prairie-queen-quilt-block.html

Spencer Museum of Art

Carrie Hall's version of Finley's with the shading changed

to give a more circular format.

Hall's block in her 1935 book The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt

may have inspired this quilt from the 1940-1980 years.

Mid-20th-century

It takes some skill in spatial relations to get all the pieces rotating the way you intended.

Different shading can emphasize the pattern's directionality.

Laura McDonough Boyd, Indiana project & the Quilt Index

Laura pieced little blocks for the cornerstones.

Rotated blocks 

Top by Ethel Hewitt Bennett, about 1915

New York project & the Quilt Index

Design potential

Roseanne Smith for Civil War Sampler

Here's a pattern from the Civil War Sampler