Block · Curves
Dresden Plate
Blades sewn in a ring and laid on a square: the great fashion of 1930s America.
- Other names
- Dresden-tallerken · Dresdner tallerken
- Known from
- USA, late 1920s and 1930s
- First known print
- In print by the early 1930s, for example McCall's pattern no. 74, "Dresden Plate and Fan Design for Quilts", which Virginia Gunn dates to 1933.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Brackman no.
- 3488a
- Family
- Curves
- Difficulty
- Hard · Curves and skewed angles, cut from templates
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
Dresden Plate was in nearly every 1930s catalogue of quilt kits, beside Lone Star, Grandmother's Flower Garden and Double Wedding Ring, the museum in Lincoln writes. The name comes, the museum says, from the fine china made in Dresden.
In the Depression it was often sewn from scraps and feed sacks, and it was printed again and again in magazines and pattern booklets. Barbara Brackman sees it as related to older wheel and fan blocks of the late 1800s, such as Grandmother's Fan.
How it is used
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 International Quilt Museum: American Quilts in the Modern Age, 1870–1940
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Dresden Plate, Louise Thonstad, 1930–1940
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Frugal Fashion: quilts of the Great Depression
- Article Barbara Brackman: Dresden Plate from McCall's (2019)