Friendship Knot

Here's a knotty problem Dawn Fox Cooper and I have been working on for a while (she's been working on it a lot harder than I have). We have been in the dark as to the source of this particular quilt design.

Here's the block.

This one is a four patch with the center cut into four pieces

In most the white center is one piece

Mary Heater Childers (1904-2003) Braxton County, West Virginia

WV project & the Quilt Index

Dawn has 23 pictures of quilts in the pattern. There must have been a commercial source. They are so much alike. She writes:

"They all appear to be of the time period 1920-50 from the fabrics. [The pictures] have been found mainly in the US & Canadian Documentation Projects or for sale on line. Names include many Single Wedding Rings, but also Wedding Ring, Ribbon & Rings, Rings & Bows (the 2 in the University of Alberta), Friendship Knot, & Engagement Ring."

Eleven of the 23 include the makers' location, one each from Connecticut, Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina & Ohio and six from West Virginia.

Essie Knicely Fluharty (1894-1980) Marion County, West Virginia
WV project & the Quilt Index

There are several patterns indexed in BlockBase

that are similar but none just like this one.

What makes it odd is that those diamond-shaped pieces repeat as a unit of two

rather than four.

This one is attributed to Mary Holmes Fisk of St.

Lawrence County, New York. (Note to Dawn: Add this one.)

The far more common variation with four green diamonds.

This one has a BlockBase number.

4047 Friendship Knot or Friendship Wreath

(not the most accurate drawing but you get the picture).

From the West Virginia project

Says Dawn: "I find it interesting to see such a small area & time frame for this pattern & hope that your history page may shed more light on this subject." I'm glad she has so much faith in me.

Well, I was finally able to help her. It's that darn Alice Brooks. (See a post here: https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/01/alice-brooks-darn-her.html  )

I've been going through Newspapers.com looking for Alice Brooks designs I missed in the first editions of BlockBase and my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. And here it is.

The block. 

I drew in a few lines. There are three wedges in the arc

just like in the examples Dawn's found.

The Alice Brooks patterns were distributed from the early 1930s till the '80s by King Features. They used a lot of bylines. Alice was secondary to the main signature of Laura Wheeler---both fictional characters. Alice's patterns were printed in fewer newspapers. The one above I found in the Boston Globe in 1936 and again in 1939. Also in US papers from Minneapolis to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Sacramento in June and July, 1936. And in three Canadian papers, the Vancouver (Canada) Sun in 1939, the Winnipeg Tribune in 1938 and in Saskatoon.

I was hoping to find a West Virginia paper as the source for the craze in that state, but no luck so far.

Dawn made her own Friendship Knot.

The pattern is going in the new edition of BlockBase as #4047.5 in the Miscellaneous category.

Friendship Knot