The Cat's in the Cradle

 

 

The Cat’s Cradle was published in The Weekly Kansas City Star on February 28, 1934.

 

 

This block, the “Cat’s Cradle,” looks easy, but is hard to piece if you are inexperienced.  The diagonal must be perfectly cut and the stitches true.  When finished in two colors it is a beautiful quilt.  Allow for seams, set together with alternate blocks of white quilted in a triangular pattern.

 

Cat's Cradle isn't the only name for this block.  Nancy Cabot called it Flying Birds, and discusses the variety of names for the same pattern.  The Birmingham News, Alabama, September 11, 1934.

 

 

“You are all well enough acquainted with the usual quilt design for birds to recognize this pattern.  Whenever four triangles are put together to make a large triangle and when the center triangle is different color from that of the other three you know the design will have the work ‘bird’ in the name somewhere.

“I am calling this attractive design ‘flying birds.’  I see them as all coming together on a hot day to perch upon the square pool in the center of the block.  Let’s   pretend this is a bird bath sitting in the garden and let’s pretend that the birds are all congregating in the one cool spot they can find.”

“Your imagination is great, Nancy, but my grandmother made a pattern like this and she called hers by the name of ‘hour glass.’ Was she wrong?”

“She was just as right as I am, Martha.  I am glad you mentioned that, for so frequently the same design is given different names by different quilt makers and then each one is sure she and her family have a patent right, as it were, on that particular name.  Many quilt patterns travel under a number of aliases.  And this is a case in point.”

 

And another name for the same pattern placed on point.  Harrison Rose, The Rural New Yorker,  May 3, 1930.

 

 

The pioneer women of the West had a way of naming their quilts “Rose” in some form or other, whether the design “savored” very much of the form of a rose or not.  Here we have a very old quilt design, and the one from which this photograph was made was nearly 100 years old.

 

Three quite different names for the same quilt block.  Nancy Page says that a pattern with four triangles put together in this fashion will be some sort of ‘Bird.’   The Rural New Yorker says that pioneer women named blocks as ‘Rose’, whether they looked like a flower or not.  And the Kansas City Star went for the string game that children play which has a likeness to this design.

Block Base adds the names Dove at the Window, Double Pyramids, Hour Glass and Wandering Lover.

As well as one design having multiple names, the same name can be associated with different patterns. Block Base lists another three patterns that have been called ‘Flying Birds’ over the years.

Quilt block names have always had a regional association.  Before the newspapers became the place to source new patchwork patterns, block designs were passed from one woman to another, with or without a name attached. Publishing quilt blocks should have standardized quilt block names, but the newspaper columnists themselves would give a new block a new name; or even redraft an old design, claim ownership, and christen it something else.  

 

 

You'll find the Cat's Cradle story and much more in the  'Romance of the Patchwork Quilt: Patchwork Patterns and Newspaper Stories', ready to download from my Etsy shop, Two Bits Patches.