Block · Curves
Drunkard's Path
A quarter circle in a square, in light and dark: turn the blocks and you get paths, waves and circles.
- Other names
- Old Maid's Puzzle
- Known from
- USA, popular from the 1890s into the 1900s
- First known print
- Both "Drunkard's Path" and "Drunkard's Patchwork" are in Marie Webster's list of quilt names of 1915.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Curves
- Difficulty
- Hard · Curves and skewed angles, cut from templates
- Grid
- 4 × 4 cells
History
Barbara Brackman has no dated examples from before the 1890s. The researcher Wilene Smith found a related design without a name in the magazine Farm & Fireside in 1891.
It was a favourite in two colours, red and white or blue and white. In the 1930s it and its relative Fool's Puzzle were sold in pattern booklets across the USA.
How it is used
Each unit is an arc between two pieces, cut from templates and sewn on a curve. The turning makes the pattern: the same unit can become a diagonal path, circles or chequered circles.
Quilts with the block
Drunkard's Path
4 × 5 blocks · 54" × 66"
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: Drunkard's Path Variations 1 (2022)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Fool's Puzzle (2022)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Temperance Quilts 1: T Blocks (2016)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Temperance
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)