Beta
All blocks

Block · Geese and triangles

Dutchman's Puzzle

Eight flying geese in pairs, turning round the centre like a pinwheel of geese.

Other names
Flying Geese · Gæssetræk
Known from
USA, from the late 1800s
First known print
The Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 (no. 26), drawn exactly like this block.
Origin
Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
Brackman no.
1339a
Family
Geese and triangles
Difficulty
Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
Grid
4 × 4 cells

History

Marie Webster has the name in her list of 1915 among those that refer to persons. Carrie Hall made the block in the early 1900s for her collection of sample blocks, now at the Spencer Museum of Art: four rose and four printed geese on a white ground. The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln has a machine-pieced Dutchman's Puzzle from 1880–1920, possibly from York County, Pennsylvania.

Who the Dutchman is, we do not know. None of the sources explains the name, and we have found nothing to tie it to the German-speaking "Pennsylvania Dutch". Beware of a mix-up: the Ladies' Art Company and Carrie Hall also have a Flying Dutchman, but that is another block of geese and hourglasses.

How it is used

The block is sewn from eight Flying Geese, two by two in four squares, each turned a quarter. It turns the way Pinwheel does, only with geese instead of half-square triangles.

With geese in two colours you see a pinwheel; with all geese in one colour on a light ground you see four pairs of geese flying round the centre.

Quilts with the block

Sources

The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of old quilts with the block are in the museums' collections.

  1. Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)
  2. Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
  3. Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Dutchman's Puzzle block
  4. Museum International Quilt Museum: Dutchman's Puzzle, possibly York County, Pennsylvania, 1880–1920
  5. Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Flying Dutchman block
All sources and thanks