Rocky Mountain Sashing: Rules & Rule Breakers

Pattern called Rocky Mountain, Crown of Thorns and New York Beauty, 

among other names, from Darwin Bearley's inventory of antique quilts

This classic Southern pattern is a complex design consisting of three or four main components. The block is a pieced fan, here with single rows of spiky points.

See a post on varieties of pieced fans:

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/10/spiky-fans.html

These blocks rarely have seams in the center.

But the pattern is more than the block. 

Without patchwork sashing it's just a Setting Sun or an Indian Summer.

Virginia Catherine Sears, Texas project

Is it a Rocky Mountain with this strip sash?

Online auction from a Tennessee estate

Or is it the combination of pieced block and pieced sash that creates the pattern?

The most common sashing pattern is a triple strip.

Center unpieced, top and bottom pieced of spiky triangles.

Lined up (mostly) to create an interesting zig zag.

Shading varies but most typically is a single colored design on a white background.

An exception: Here's a dramatic late-19th-century example from Julie Silber's inventory

with variegated spiky triangles and triple strips between the triangles.

It isn't until you see an exception to the rules that you realize there are rules.

Hey! Those triangles should be all the same color!

Ella Miller Williams, made in Kentucky

Texas project.

Five plain strips!

Regulation pattern.

Elizabeth Crosby Wright,Hemblen County, Tennessee

from the Tennessee project & the Quilt Index

Elizabeth got the shading WRONG! She reversed it. Crazy woman!

She's not alone.

Now you might think you'd never make one of these because you

worry about your points being pointed. But apparently, pointy points

were not a necessity. There's a whole subclass of blunt-pointed versions,

mostly late in the 19th century and into the 20th.

Truncated triangles.

Bill Volckening's collection

Hedwig Fertsch Buske, Texas project, 1930s

So blunt they become rectangles.

Bingham family, Tennessee

Down to the basics.

I think Bill owns many of these.

The pattern wasn't commercially published until Mountain Mist started distributing their New York Beauty in 1930. Blunted points.

Capper's Weekly followed in March, 1931 for "Springtime in the Rockies,"

which also included blunt points (and an interesting edge treatment.)

Bill has found several made from that pattern after 1930.

These published patterns may have been a license for truncated triangles.

Cindy Rennels's Inventory

Another variation is sashing with the two rows of triangles forming a diamond,

no center strip. In this mid-19th c (?) example it's hard to see if the

diamonds are two separate strips.

Stella Rubin's Inventory

But in this mid-20th-c four block the close-ups show the green

shapes are actually pieced as diamonds.

As they seem to be in this mid-19th version from Sandra Starley's collection.

Kentucky quilt from the Minnesota Project

Sold on ebay later.

Occasionally one comes across diamonds set the long way.

It's a pleasure to see the variation within the basic structure, something often found in Southern quilts. Set up some rules and then break them.

Mountain Mist pattern

Short cut in the sash