What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 

The Friendship Dahlia appears to be a most popular quilt block in the 1930s.  It is an applique pattern with eight overlapping petals, a stem which was curved or straight, and a center circle to cover the petal points.  It was a "friendship" block because to get the variety of prints desired the quiltmaker needed to swap materials with her friends.  The block was also made without the variety as shown below (the overlapping petals were a bit challenging for Alma Hampton.)

 

 

 

The Friendship Dahlia design was an Aunt Martha favorite,  pattern number C397.

The instructions state to "crease to ...

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"Aunt Martha" quilt kits first appeared in 1930.  The pre-cut kits did not stay in the market for long but Aunt Martha's pattern books and catalogues had a long print run from 1931 all the way to 1977.  You can find out more about Aunt Martha from Wilene Smith's research.

I now have pdf copies of a few of the Aunt Martha books.  The following one was one of the later books, printed in 1960.

One of the patterns is for a Hexagon Wreath, and I thought that a single block would make a nice sample quilt. This ...

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Grayce Wilson was the maker of this fan block.

Grayce Wilson lived in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania and made this block about 1938.  She was a farmer's wife with three sons, who all worked in the coal mines of western Pennsylvania.

According to BlockBase the name of this pattern is Milady's Fan, and it was published in one of the Aunt Martha series of pattern booklets.  With some Googling I found that Milady's Fan was in book #3500, "Easy Quilts".  Some more Googling located an Etsy seller with a digital download of "Easy Quilts", and very shortly I ...

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