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	Bricks & Arrows

Bricks and arrows are made up of rectangles (and a few triangles). Click on a small icon to go to the block you want to see.

Hairpin Catcher Hit & Miss Brick Wall Brickwork Quilt General Sherman's March Mosaic No. 8 London Roads Fireside Visitor The Double Arrow Broad Arrow Maple Leaf

> Hairpin Catcher Hairpin Catcher Hairpin Catcher Wooster, 1972 Brickwall One Hairpin Catcher and Brickwall One, according to Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, use only two fabrics. Brackman cites Ann S. Wooster's Quiltmaking (1972) for Hairpin Catcher and Pauline W. Rodgers' 20 Favorite Patchwork Quilts (1980) for Brickwall One.

Hit & Miss Hairpin Catcher Hit & Miss Finley, 1929 Hairpin Catcher/Brickwall One Finley's Hit & Miss requires only that rectangles alternate dark and light colors. The blocks are twice as wide as they are tall, but those proportions are just a guideline.

Brick Wall Brick Wall Brick Wall Finley, 1929 Brick Work Brick Wall is from Ruth Finley's 1929 Old Patchwork Quilts. She described it as varicolored — that is, as a scrap quilt — with alternating light and dark patches. Again, the "bricks" are twice as long as they are wide, and they're offset by half a brick in a pattern that anyone who's seen a brick wall, or even a fake brick wall, will recognize. Brick Work is Carrie Hall's name for the design, regardless of colors, in Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America (1935).

Brickwork Quilt Brickwork Quilt Brickwork Quilt Ladies Art Company #293, 1897 Other block names come with specific color placements. The Ladies Art Company's #293, published in 1897, is one such block. Like The block is not quite square (because the pattern isn't square), but like Brick Wall, the blocks are half as tall as they are wide.

General Sherman's March General Sherman's March General Sherman's March Finley, 1929 Depression/Streak o' Lightning/Zig Zag/Old Garden Wall Sherman, a Union general during the Civil War, destroyed a swath of Georgia's crops and homes during a five-week southward march from the inland city of Atlanta to coastal Savannah, in 1864. These diagonal rows of light and dark blocks seem to march across the quilt top too. General Sherman's Quilt is probably the oldest published name. Brackman's Encyclopedia cites Capper's/Famous Features as the original source. All the other names listed here, except Depression, also come from Brackman's book. Depression was the Kansas City Star's name for the block in 1942. Why "Depression?" The Missouri reader who contributed the design to the Star wrote that she'd made her quilt by hand-dyeing tobacco sacks and lining them with feed sacks—for thrift's sake, we assume. For her, the Depression was not over.

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Mosaic No. 8

This two-color block is from the 1897 Ladies Art Company catalog, its No. 336.

It looks like a revolving wheel of U shapes or a circle of arrows inside an octagon, but it creates an interesting pinwheel where the blocks meet. Three colors bring out the arrow shape, so we've included a mockup of that too.

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London Roads

London Roads in three colors

London Roads LAC #238 1897

London Roads in three colors

Quarter-square triangles in each corner create a different look for a Ladies Art Company block that is otherwise identical to Mosaic No. 8.

Take a look at the whole-quilt mockup and imagine navigating a town if the roads were like this.

The block seems well named. Even now, London cabbies who want to claim that they have "the knowledge" of the city have to pass a test so difficult that it's legendary.

Both Mosaic No. 8 and London Roads (#238) are laid out on a 9 x 9 grid.

Our three-color mockup shows that this block is a real chameleon.

London transportation in the 19th century. Note the extra horse walking alongside. It's the spare mare. (We brake for alliteration.)

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Fireside Visitor

Another block with hidden arrow shapes is Clara Stone's Fireside Visitor, from her Practical Needlework (1906).

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The Double Arrow

This 1933 Kansas City Star block is a four-patch — which is to say, each of the side strips with arrows constitutes a quarter of the width of the block.

Identifying block structure as "patches" is deeply traditional but somewhat whimsical in practice.

If the number of squares across the layout grid is four or a multiple of four, it's called a four-patch. If it's three or a multiple of three, it's a nine-patch. Double Arrow is the only block on this page that is not a nine-patch. There are also one-patches, where all the block shapes are the same, two patches, and five patches.

But then, sometimes quilters count the squares across the top and call it, say, an eight patch or six patch.

We think of it all as shop talk. Since this website is for newbies, we talk about grids instead.

Broad Arrow

A Farm Journal supplement from 1941 offered Broad Arrow, which is all but identical to Maple Leaf, below. It takes three colors to bring out the arrow shape.

In our copy of the original, it's hard to see the seam lines. Our best guess, at upper left, is drawn on a 6x6 grid. There are other possibilities. Click on the lavender "Make it!" icon to see some options, including an EZ version of Maple Leaf, below.


The blue "Make it!" icon links to a tutorial.

To see an entirely different Maple Leaf block, click here:

Maple Leaf

Maple Leaf is simply one quarter of a Broad Arrow block. You could have arrows of a dozen colors pointing every which way. As you can see, though, there's no drama with just two colors and one direction. No differentiation, no arrow.