Bricks

The oldest we have found is a quilt from about 1835 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum with light and dark bricks in diagonal rows and a printed border. Barbara Brackman shows one with a border of Indian chintz, which she estimates at about 1850, but writes that you usually see the pattern around 1900. The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, has Bricks from 1870–1890, probably from Pennsylvania, a Brick Wall from 1880–1900, possibly from Indiana, and one from England from about 1880 with quotations from the Bible.

Marie Webster has the name Brickwork Quilt in her list of 1915, and Carrie Hall made a Brick Work for her collection of sample blocks. According to Brackman, Ruth Finley called the pattern Hit & Miss in 1929, but that refers more to the colours than to the shape. Bricks of wool became a style of their own: Brackman's oldest dated one is embroidered 1895, and name quilts used the pattern too, like one from the Mizpah Circle of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, from 1941.

Two names look alike but mean something else. Bricklayer from Gee's Bend, Alabama, is according to Souls Grown Deep a variation of Log Cabin and Housetop, not this block. And when Finley called the pieces of Chimney Sweep "brick shaped", that is another block of rectangles and squares.

Brackman gives the recipe: rectangles twice as long as they are tall, sewn in strips and offset like bricks. She suggests 2½" × 5" from precut strips.

The colours decide the look: mixed scraps give a wall, while light and dark rows make diagonals or a staircase, as in the zigzag quilts. See it in Bricks.