Block · Geese and triangles
Birds in the Air
Small half-square triangles in a staircase across the block, like a flock of birds rising into the air.
- Other names
- Flock of Geese
- Known from
- USA, from the 1840s
- First known print
- Uncertain. The name is neither in the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 nor in Marie Webster's list of 1915. Barbara Brackman writes in one place that Ruth Finley listed it in 1929, in another that it was printed around 1940 by the thread firm Coats & Clark.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Geese and triangles
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 3 × 3 cells
History
The design is older than the name: Brackman takes it back to the 1840s, and the museum in Lincoln has a "Birds in Air" from 1850–1870 from Massachusetts and one from 1880–1900 from New Jersey, sewn by Mary Linderburger. Finley also gives the names Flying Birds and Flock of Geese.
A well-known quilt with bands of such triangles is the Quaker Deborah Coates' silk quilt from Pennsylvania, 1830–1860, now in Lancaster. On the triangle in the middle a kneeling slave is printed with the words "Deliver me from the oppression of man": an open protest against slavery. What she called the pattern herself, we do not know.
How it is used
The block is half-square triangles in one half and plain squares in the other. Turned so the triangles all point one way, the birds fly in a flock across the quilt.
Its many small triangles make it good for scraps. It is related to Flying Geese and Lady of the Lake, which are also built of triangles in rows.
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.
- Article Barbara Brackman: Civil War Quilts: Birds in the Air (2011)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Birds in the Air Pattern & A Poetic License (2017)
- Museum LancasterHistory: The Struggle Against Slavery
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Birds in Air, possibly Massachusetts, 1850–1870
- 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)