Block · Squares and four-patches
Bow Tie
Four squares, two opposite ones with a small triangle in a corner, so the two dark ones meet in a knot in the middle: a bow tie.
- Other names
- Necktie · Sløjfe
- Known from
- USA and Canada, from the late 1800s
- First known print
- As "Neck Tie" in the Ladies' Art Company's pattern catalogue from St. Louis; "Necktie" is also in Marie Webster's list of 1915.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Brackman no.
- 2533
- Family
- Squares and four-patches
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
The name has changed over time. The mail-order firm Ladies' Art Company sold the block as Neck Tie, Marie Webster wrote Necktie in her list of quilt names in 1915, and today it is mostly called Bow Tie. Nobody knows who sewed it first.
The dated quilts are from the late 1800s on. The museum in Lincoln has Bow Tie quilts from 1880–1920 and several from Amish families in Ohio and the Midwest, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Canada, has one from about 1912 in red and white, where the knot is a small square of its own.
How it is used
The block is a four patch: two squares in the tie's colour and two in the background's, the tie's two corners sewn onto the background squares as small squares and trimmed on the diagonal, as on a Snowball. It is cut with a ruler and suits scraps.
With the blocks all alike, every tie points the same way on the diagonal; turned every other time they make diamonds and zigzags.
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 Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Article Barbara Brackman: 1894: Continuing Patchwork Trends (2020)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Bow Tie, 1880–1920
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Bow Tie, Amish, possibly Ohio
- Museum Agnes Etherington Art Centre: Bow Tie quilt, Jennie Kells Johnston, c. 1912
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Underground Railroad Quilts?