Block · Geese and triangles
Big Dipper
Four hourglasses, every other turned, so the dark triangles meet in a star in the middle.
- Other names
- Hourglass · Timeglas
- Known from
- USA, from the late 1800s
- First known print
- The Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 (no. 320), drawn as four hourglasses.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Brackman no.
- 1195b
- Family
- Geese and triangles
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
Big Dipper is the American name for the seven bright stars of the Great Bear. Marie Webster has it in her list of names of 1915, and Carrie Hall made the block in the early 1900s for her collection of sample blocks, now at the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas: navy and white, with the dark triangles gathered in the middle.
The same block has several names. Ruth Finley called it Yankee Puzzle in her quilt book of 1929, and Barbara Brackman also gives Electric Fan, Hour Glass and Pork and Beans. The last came, she says, from the Canadian paper Maritime Farmer in the 1920s or 30s, for no known reason.
How it is used
The block is sewn from four hourglasses, so it is quick to cut with a ruler. The colours decide what you see: with the dark triangles towards the middle a star, with print and light taking turns a whirl of eight arms, as in Carrie Hall's Yankee Puzzle.
Jinny Beyer suggests making it from scraps, keeping only the light and dark triangles in their places.
Related blocks
Sources
The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of old quilts with the block are in the museums' collections.
- Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Big Dipper block
- Article Barbara Brackman: 49 Yankee Puzzle (2011)
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Yankee Puzzle block
- Article Jinny Beyer: BlockaWeek: Big Dipper (2005)