FieldGuidetoQuilts.com
Arc & Fan blocks

Fans and other quarter-square arcs are quintessentially flexible quilt blocks that are set into circles, half-circles, rows like rickrack, and more.

For Drunkard's Path blocks, click here:


Pointed Ovals Queen's Pride Queen's Pride
(4-patch)
Chimney Swallows
Stone
Chimney Swallows
LAC
Chimney Swallows
Hall
Friendship Knot
Finley
Friendship Knot
Wheeler
Friendship Knot
Hall
Cleo-patra's
Fan
Letha's Electric Fan
Winding
Ways
Peter & Paul Greek Cross
Grand-mother's
Fan
Milady's Fan
Quilter's Fan
Lilian's Favorite



Pointed Ovals


Pointed Ovals
Pointed Ovals Kansas City Star, 1955
Love's Chain

Pointed Ovals was a latecomer to the Kansas City Star's library of quilt blocks; it was published in 1955 and credited to a reader from Oklahoma. Her example, the Star said, was in orchid, yellow, and white.

Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns cites Nancy Cabot for the name Love's Chain.



Queen's Pride (nine-patch)


Queen's Pride 9-patch
Queen's Pride
Nine-patch
Wheeler, 1934
An unknown designer at Old Chelsea Station Needlecraft Service produced this block back in 1934.

It was credited to Laura Wheeler — a pseudonym, as was the name Alice Brooks, whose designs also came from Old Chelsea Station.

Almost all of the OCS blocks appeared in the 1930s, when Art Deco reached the height of its popularity, and many of their blocks feature curves — a welcome challenge, no doubt, for experienced quilters.

Queen's Pride (four-patch)


Queen's Pride
Four-patch
Queen's Pride 4-patch
The block was also done with a larger center square, drawn on a grid of 4 squares by 4.

Chimney Swallow(s)






Chimney Swallow (Stone)
Chimney Swallows (LAC)
Chimney Swallows
Ladies Art Company #355, 1897
Chimney Swallow Stone, 1906
The half-dozen Chimney Swallows variations are half sisters.

They came from Clara Stone, the Ladies Art Company, Ruth Finley, Nancy Cabot, Laura Wheeler, and Carrie Hall, who published two variations in 1935.

The oldest, as usual, was the Ladies Art Company block, published as #355 in the 1897 catalog.

The swallow
in the upper
right corner.

Clara Stone's variation came along nine years later in her 1906 booklet Practical Needlework.

Its two colors create a silhouette of four swallows with their beaks touching at the block's center. In Stone's stark dark and light colors, it's not all that easy to see, but they're there.

Oddly enough, the block was called Chimney Swallow (singular).


Twenty-four years after Stone published her variations, Carrie Hall published two more in Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America.

Chimney Swallows Hall, 1935
Chimney Swallows
Hall, 1935





Chimney Swallows (Hall)





Chimney Swallows (Hall)
What's the difference between all these blocks?

Look at the outer curves. The curve is more dramatic on the LAC's.

Hall's includes the multi-piece curves of a Double Wedding Ring. Hall also stitched up a block similar to the LAC's, using white, gray, and blue. We added blue to the background for the whole-quilt mockup.

Hall didn't design her blocks, to our knowledge; she collected them on her back-road travels through rural America. Very likely it was a mathematically minded farm wife who came up with this sophisticated design.

Rural quilters were resourceful. They often measured their blocks by folding fabric squares in halves and thirds and sometimes in complex configurations that were just awesome.



Friendship Knot (Finley)





Friendship Knot (Finley)
Friendship Knot Finley, 1929
Starry Crown

Ruth Finley, who collected quilt-block designs for her 1929 book Old Patchwork Quilts, traced this design from a block she found in a box of 1860s-era "trash" in the basement of an old church.

There were also fundraising notes from the church women's group: They earned $2.00 for quilting a quilt 2-1/2 x 2-1/2 yards square. (Quilting is sewing a quilt's back, stuffing, and top together with decorative stitching.)

Finley estimated that such a quilt would have 1,000 yards of fancy stitching, done at 5 yards per hour. The means the ladies earned one penny an hour. In 2019, that would be about 17 cents an hour. The pay hasn't improved much. Just check out the selling prices for quilts on eBay.

Per Beyer, Finley's block is based on a 22x22 grid.

Friendship Knot (Wheeler)


Friendship Knot Wheeler, 1933



Friendship Knot (Wheeler)
Laura Wheeler's Friendship Knot came along in 1933. It looks much like a Wedding Ring combined with Ruth Finley's version of the block.

The Wheeler version has thicker arc shapes than Finley's. The pieces within the arcs are are scrap fabrics.

The block and the Friendship Knot below are both based on star grids.

Friendship Knot (Hall)

Friendship Knot
Hall, 1935



Friendship Knot (Hall)
Carrie Hall's 1935 version, which lacked the pieces within the arcs, was done in the same proportions as Wheeler's.

We've posted diagrams for all three blocks. Click on the "Make It!" icon to see them.

Cleopatra's Fan

Cleopatra's Fan
Cleopatra's Fan
This is one of the quilt blocks published by Old Chelsea Needlecraft Co. under the name Laura Wheeler, whose true identity remains a secret to this day. It was published in the Cincinnati Enquirer on October 5, 1934.

The instructions recommended setting the blocks on point, as in our pink-bordered example. The other example shows four blocks, or the equivalent of a full circle.
We think of it as Cleopatra's Circle..

Cleopatra's Circle (one possible setting)

Letha's Electric Fan

Letha's Electric Fan KCS, 1938
Letha's Electric Fan
Silver Swan Electric Fan,
ca. 1935

Photo courtesy of Emerson Air Comfort Products
This block was published in the Kansas City Star in 1938.

That was four years after the Emerson Co. came out with a fan called the Silver Swan. It was not only a top seller but became "a design icon," one journalist wrote.*

The block layout is made of four rectangular miniblocks, each with a quarter-block fan, placed on a 12 x 12 grid with a square containing a circle in the middle.





*John Seabrook, "James Dyson: "Annals of Invention: How to Make It," The New Yorker, 9/20/2010.



Winding Ways

Winding Ways
Winding Ways
LAC, #463
1922

Rob Peter to Pay Paul/Robbing Peter to Pay Paul/Peter & Paul/Nashville/Ways of the World/Wheel of Mystery/Wheel of Mysterie/Wondrous Ways/Four Leaf Clover/Yours for Luck

This beautiful and very popular block got its name in the usual way — the Ladies Art Company published it (#463, 1922). It was republished under a flurry of names in the 1930s, and then once again in 1959, in the Kansas City Star, as Yours for Luck.

It's made up of nine blocks that are all but identical to a Peter & Paul block. That block is a four-patch, i.e. four squares, with one sail-like piece per quarter square. Perhaps that made it easier to put the block together. We've colored it in to show you, but in the original, the square was in a background color.

The "Make It!" icon links to a page of diagrams.

Peter & Paul






Peter & Paul

Peter & PaulGrandmother Clark, 1932
Wheel of Mystery/Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Grandmother Clark (Peter & Paul and Wheel of Mystery, 1932) and Mrs. Danner (Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, 1954) published the four-leaf-clover block at left, which is Winding Ways writ small — except that there is a tiny gap where the shapes meet in the center. In the original, the square is in the background color, and it is in our mockup too.

You can make either the LAC's or the Grandmother Clark block with our diagrams. Just click on the "Make It!" icon above.


Greek Cross


Greek Cross
Greek Cross
LAC, #173
1897
Maltese Cross

The Ladies Art Company catalog's #173, Greek Cross added a touch of grace with gentle curves in the corners. The angle seems to be identical to Winding Ways, Peter & Paul, and Dusty Miller — but the LAC thunk it up first.

Nancy Cabot called it Maltese Cross in a 1938 Chicago Tribune column.

Grandmother's Fan

Grandmother's Fan (squiggle)Grandmother's Fan (traditional)
Grandmother's Fan
Hall, 1935


Another discovery by dressmaker and quilt researcher Carrie Hall, published in The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America (1935).

Grandmother's Fan appears to be a scrap block in Hall's book, and it is a scrap block in Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia.

Brackman, whose source is Ruby McKim, describes the solid (narrow) edge as an appliqued braid.


Milady's Fan




Milady's Fan (traditional)
Milady's Fan
Aunt Martha
ca. 1958
Milady's Fan is from Aunt Martha booklet No. 3500, "Easy Quilts." It was published about 1958, according to Jinny Beyer's Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns (2009).



Full circle
Each ray is made of two to three pieces of fabric. The inner part is all the same fabric, but the outer rays are all different scrap fabrics.

The rays can be appliqued on a background fabric, or they can be extensions of the outer rays.

Experienced sewing machine users may even be able to zig and zag the rays and background together.

We've mentioned that fan blocks are quite versatile. We've included several example mockups in glorious disarray below.





Butterflies




Squiggle


Quilter's Fan

Grandmother's Fan (traditional)
Quilter's Fan
KCS, 1940
The Kansas City Star published this graceful block in 1940. It is a one-patch, meaning that all the pieces are the same shape and size. More one-patch blocks are in the Other section of our site.




Lilian's Favorite

Lilian's Favorite
Lilian's Favorite
Stone, 1906
Lilian's Favorite is one of Clara Stone's 1906 Practical Needlework blocks, and it has an interesting personality as a whole quilt.

It looks a bit like Op Art. It also looks like an axe head. We think, "Lilian Borden took an axe/She gave her mother forty whacks..." which wasn't funny when Lizzie did it, either.

We want to like Lilian's Favorite, but we'll settle for appreciating it.