What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 Today's block from 90 Years Ago is called Counterpane.

 The quilt block Prairie Queen was posted by Nancy Cabot in 1934.

Every one interested in quilts recognizes the simple but widely used nine patch designs.  "Prairie Queen" was made in 1850 by one of the hardy pioneer women.  What inspired the title can only be conjectured, but the attractiveness of the block compliments the inspiration.

Chicago Tribune March 26, 1934

The pattern looks complicated but it is just a nine patch design, with four half square triangles, four 4-patches and one plain square.  When Ruby McKim published Prairie Queen two months later as part of the States Patchwork Quilt ...

 Wyoming Valley belongs to that rare category of newspaper patterns printed on February 29 - a Leap Year quilt block.

Wyoming Valley

 London Roads must have been a popular quilt block, I have a number of antique London Roads in my collection.  The design is a 9-patch, so simple piecing and a variety of colour placement.

This is a big block, 15 inches square.  Each of the nine patches is a simple pattern that work together to make an interesting patchwork block.

Another big block with some bold material choices.  The blue print is a globe encircled by a crescent moon and five stars; the red print might be hockey sticks or little flags.

This block is smaller with some good use ...

This week's 1934 block is Key West from Nancy Cabot.

Key West

The diamonds of this interesting quilt block, combined with bright, vivid colors of yellow print, plain blue, and scarlet, create a design that is well nigh unbeatable.  It was named by an enterprising young southern woman after the seaport city on a western island of the Florida keys.

Chicago Tribune  February 6, 1934

I wonder if the "enterprising young southern woman" was on vacation.  The Florida Keys would be a nice place to be when the weather was right.  Perhaps a road trip in a brand new ...

 This week's block from 90 Years Ago is called Next Door Neighbor.

 It is not too surprising that quilt blocks sewn during the 1930s had names like Thrifty Wife, Economy Patch, and Odds and Ends.  Using scraps of fabric was one way to make quilts and the Depression years was certainly a time of Making Do.

Economy Patch

Four T's

Nancy Cabot's 'Four T's' design appears simple but takes a little bit of fussing to make it well.  

 At the start of 2020, my New Year resolution was to share a quilt block form the Kansas City Star each day on my Facebook page Two Bits Patches.  It was so much fun that I continued into 2021, this time sharing patterns from Nancy Cabot in the Chicago Tribune.  On Christmas Day in 1935 the quilt pattern was Sunbeam Crossroad.

Sunbeam Crossroad

What a cheerful name!  This is how it appeared in the Tribune 86 years ago.

One of the oldest of the middle western patterns is this delightful little pieced block with such a cheerful name.  "Sunbeam Crossroad ...

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 ...

 2021 is half gone, hard to believe.  In 2020 I posted a Kansas City Star block every day on my Facebook page.  This year I chose quilt blocks from Nancy Cabot of the Chicago Tribune and the block #182 for 1st July was Indian Charm. 183 patterns to go til 2022.

There was a superstition among the ancient quiltmakers that black, included in a coverlet, was not to be taken as a good omen, and no one ever dared consider it in combination with other colors. When "Indian Charm" was adapted from an old Indian pattern the original designer defied ...

 Here at Two Bits Patches, 2020 was the year of the quilt blocks printed in the Kansas City Star newspaper in the 1930s and 1940s. (2020 was the year of many things but let's accentuate the positive.)

Here are a few of the 1930s blocks that came from the Kansas City Star.  I could have cropped out my work table but that's my style - organised chaos.

12 months ago Block #1 was posted on the Two Bits Patches Facebook page, and today will see block #366. It was a very successful New Year's resolution.  So, what is ...

Ta-DONE!  I have not been this proud of finishing a single block in a long time, but this one was a bruiser.  It's a vintage block pattern called Cathedral Window, designed by Nancy Cabot and originally published in the Chicago Tribune in 1933.  I foundation paper pieced as much of it as I could, and then there were SIXTEEN Y-seams of traditional piecing to assemble those FPP'd units into the finished block you see below.  The points are sharp, the block is flat, and it measures EXACTLY 20 1/2" square.  That makes me quite a happy camper ...

When I was recreating, resizing, recoloring and revising the Moda Modern Building Blocks Sampler in EQ8 Quilt Design Software, swapping out some of the blocks for others in my EQ Block Library, I didn't pay much attention to the information contained in the software "notecard" for each block.  After toiling away at all of these Y-seams, however, I was curious about where this block I'm making came from and I went back to my software to find out.

Cathedral Window by Nancy Cabot, Originally Published in 1933 Chicago Tribune