Flying Bats

Diamonds, squares and triangles.

Flying Bats: Appropriate for Halloween week

Earliest publication probably the Ladies Art Company catalog, which called it Slashed Album.

Here it is in their 1897 catalog.

Other companies picked it up.

Most of these are from online auctions

Sarah Renn Griffin

Tennessee project & the Quilt Index

Velvets!

UPDATE: Last minute addition. I found the pattern as Yankee Charm in a Comfort magazine scrapbook kept by Mildred Dickerson in the Quilt Research Center at the University of Nebraska Libraries. Yankee Charm was sent to the magazine by Mrs. M.A. Sampson of Texas.

Rainbow Fan Variations

I thought I'd collect all my photos of this fan variation.

It wasn't hard.

This one looks to be 1940s-50s

From an online auction

Seems to be the only photo I have of the pattern

The Ladies' Art Company published it as  Rainbow

The Quilt Index has a page with the LAC diagram.

Butterick published a pattern for this fan like Sun-Burst (half a sunburst)

design in 1889.

George Snyder posted this early 20th-century Georgia quilt on

our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook page.

Just three double fans amidst the squares, rectangles & triangles.

Half a plate

A few quilters have used this half a circle set

This one from the Oregon Project and the Quilt Index.

It's a fairly easy way to get a complicated look.

Out of print pattern.

If you rotated every other row and did a half-drop repeat......

Snake-ish

Baby Bunting or Rattlesnake?

Baby Bunting is a pretty name for this pretty quilt from the 1930-1950's

Each fan has four spiky purple points

A lot like this Kansas City Star pattern that has 5 points.

There must have been a published source for these two-color quilts with four spikes per arc.

But maybe it wasn't published.

Just handed around in a small region

or sold by an entrepreneur with a pattern business.

The fans with spiky points seem to have been published just as set arrangements, rather than just a block

(See last week's post: https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/10/spiky-fans.html)

Variations were popular with pattern publishers in the 1920s and '30s.

#3370 in BlockBase

I'd imagine the Comfort pattern (probably in late 1920s) had

much to do with the design's popularity.

A sketch from pattern collector Mildred Dickerson's scrapbook

in her files at the Quilt Research Center at

the University of Nebraska.

The Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune saw it as a

Chinese Fan 

A baby bunting is an outdoor wrap for an infant. The connection seems obscure.

Polly Mello owns one the Arkansas family called Oklahoma Snake Ring pictured in the book Southern Quilts. Less obscure.

This quilt looks more 1890-1920 than later

As do the next 3

I'd guess it was a pattern handed around in the Southern states

in the 1880-1920 period, developed out of the Rocky Mountain

or Crown of Thorns design.

Note how many have half blocks along the edge.

Is that a Southern style trait?

Rocky Mountain

From a Tennessee estate 

Willie Yeager, Paris, Texas

Marcia Kaylakie's collection, about 1925

Another way of arranging the blocks; another vernacular pattern, not published until recently. Marcia's the expert on snake quilts. See her chapter in Mary Kerr's Southern Quilts. For those of you who'd like to see more snake quilts:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2019/03/rattlesnake-other-reptiles.html

All the quilts above have spiky points and there are not very many out there.

Far more common is this fan design with spokes with smooth edges.

 1930-1960s

Commonly called Mohawk Trail.

BlockBase #3369

Ruby McKim was probably the first to publish it with the name Mohawk Trail,

a block for New York in her Patchwork Parade of States in the late 1920s.

Spiky Fans

I've been going through my fan pictures and I'm surprised to find how few published patterns featured these fans with triangular points.

I've got several in BlockBase but they are not 19th century publications.

This is a late arrival in the Ladies's Art Company catalog,

in the 1928 version but not the 1898 edition.

Spiky-edged fans were certainly being made

in the mid-to-late 19th century. This one from a Jeffrey Evans Auction.

You just have to know where to look for them....

The quilt with its Portuguese striped chintz border looks to be 1840s

...In Rocky Mountain quilts with pieced sashing.

Shephard family, 1880-1920

Arkansas, Collection Arkansas State Museum

Not that the pattern for the block and the set was published until the mid-20th century

when Mountain Mist published it as New York Beauty.

Which probably horrified more than one Southern quilter

who considered it a regional design: Crown of Thorns or Rocky Mountain.

One interesting detail about these spiky fan designs before 1920 or so is that the fans are in the corners, not divided into quarters as most regular old fan blocks were constructed.

A regular old fan

1950-1980?

Julie Silber's inventory 1860-1900

You also see this version of double spikes in the mid- to late-19th century but there is no published source for a fan design like this.

See a post on Whig's Defeat quilts constructed like this:

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/09/whigs-defeat-or-ladyfingers.html

Whig's Defeat quilts were also constructed like the Rocky Mountain with

a patchwork sashing.

Source? Looks like early 20th century?

The rules seem to have been:

Single spikes for Rocky Mountain

Double spikes for Whig's Defeat

Patterns scarce until recently when innovative quilters started digitally designing and printing of these challenging blocks.

I was going to add some Mohawk Trail/Baby Bunting quilts but they are going to have to wait till next week.