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Washington's Puzzle
















Washington's Puzzle
The Ladies Art Company published this block as its #32 in 1897. Seventy-six years later, it was republished as Checkerboard Skew in the Gutcheons' Perfect Patchwork Primer.
Delaware Crosspatch

Crosspatch
Cabot, 1937
















The invention of Nancy Cabot, Delaware Crosspatch was published in the Chicago Tribune in 1937.
Duck Creek Puzzle
















Duck Creek Puzzle

Cabot, 1937Like Delaware Crosspatch, Cabot's Duck Creek Puzzle was published in the Chicago Tribune in 1937.
Jinny Beyer drew up this block on a 40 x 40 grid in her Quilter's Album, and we've followed her lead in drawing it here.
It might look terrific with every block offset by half. Someday we'll do a mockup of that too.
Windmill/Radio Windmill
















Windmill/The Windmill of Amsterdam
Barbara Brackman credits Nancy Cabot with the name Windmill in her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. However, Beyer places the first time this block was published as 1931 in Prize Winning Designs, and notes that it was called The Windmill of Amsterdamin 1933 in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The Kansas City Star published the block in four-part pattern (right) in 1941, crediting the design to an Iowa reader. The changes are few. The KCS block was illustrated with high-contrast colors to create a noticeable star shape, which they saw as the focus of the block. They called it Radio Windmill.
Radio Windmill is the shortest unique name we've seen for the block, and because the two blocks shown here are so closely related, we'd call both of them Radio Windmill.
Arabic Lattice


LAC, #416
ca. 1901
Arabic Lattice came along around 1901, published as the Ladies Art Company's #416. The LAC's catalog illustration showed four quarter blocks that are tilted and then flipped to be mirror images. And while it may not be as obvious as it is in some other blocks, a four-patch checkerboard is integral to the design.
Here's a quarter block:



