A CLOUD OF QUILT PATTERNS: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PATTERN IN BLOG FORM UPDATES & ADDITIONS BY BARBARA BRACKMAN

Monday, June 24, 2019

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.


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:


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

3 comments:

  1. A very interesting post. Thanks for this information!

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  2. Really like the one Roseann made

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  3. I made a "Prairie Queen" for my aunt a few years ago because she's from Illinois. I did the Carrie Hall circular version.
    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VWrLdjQY-gs/UMDUqNcPslI/AAAAAAAAIHU/JKT1GpDKaGc/s1600/Z+Incoming+018.JPG

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