Block · Geese and triangles
Broken Dishes
Four half-square triangles, turned so the seams make a diamond in the middle.
- Known from
- Triangles from the oldest quilts; the name in the USA by 1915 at the latest
- First known print
- Carrie Hall's sample block from the early 1900s at the Spencer Museum of Art has four quarters, each drawn like this one. We have found no earlier print of this very block.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Geese and triangles
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
Fields of triangles are found in some of the oldest quilts. Barbara Brackman writes that the names most used for them today, Broken Dishes and Yankee Puzzle, come from books by Ruby McKim and Ruth Finley from the first half of the 1900s, and she calls their histories dubious.
The name itself is older, but first belonged to other blocks. According to a reader of Brackman's blog, the paper Hearth and Home printed a Broken Dish in 1896, a block with squares in the corners. Needlecraft Magazine used Broken Dishes in 1930 for yet another block, and in 1937 the Kansas City Star called a third Modern Broken Dish. In 1915 Marie Webster puts Broken Dish among the names so fanciful that they are sure to provoke a grin.
Museums use the name broadly for quilts of triangles. The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln has a variation from New England from 1820–1840, a signature quilt from Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, from 1887 and a doll quilt from 1830–1860 that the museum thinks was made by a child practising. The Henry Ford has a red and white crib quilt from 1860–1865.
How it is used
The block is four half-square triangles and is among the first ones people sew. Turned other ways the same triangles give Pinwheel, and divided once more they become hourglasses.
It suits scraps, as the doll quilt and the signature quilt show: only light and dark need to keep their places.
Quilts with the block
Broken Dishes
8 × 10 blocks · 56" × 68"
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.
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Broken Dishes block
- Article Barbara Brackman: Early American Quilts: Knickerbocker Style for St. Nicholas's Day (2025)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Block Mystery (2011)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Yankee Notions #11: Modern Broken Dish (2020)
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Broken Dishes variation, New England, 1820–1840
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Broken Dishes, Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, 1887
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Broken Dishes doll quilt, 1830–1860
- Museum The Henry Ford: Broken Dishes Crib Quilt, 1860–1865