Four Patch

Colonial Williamsburg calls the four patch the simplest of all pieced patterns. The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, has two quilts of it, possibly from Pennsylvania, which the museum dates to 1790–1810 and 1800–1820: in one the blocks form diagonal chains, in the other they stand on point. Barbara Brackman, however, found no four patch quilt with an inscribed date before 1830, and she thinks the nine patch was far more popular before then.

Colonial Williamsburg also writes of a quilt from 1835–1850 that it was often the first block a young quilter made, and in 1915 Marie Webster quotes Bessie Daingerfield on the girls of Appalachia proudly showing their first four patch or nine patch. Neither the Ladies' Art Company nor Webster has a plain four patch in their lists; according to Brackman the paper Farm Journal called it Squares Upon Squares.

Carrie Hall's Four-Patch at the Spencer Museum of Art is two small four patches and two plain squares, the block Brackman would call a double four patch today. The museum in Lincoln has a double four patch from 1830–1850 and an Amish quilt from 1913 by Lydia Schmucker of Indiana.

In the 1870s a charm quilt was a quilt in which no two pieces of fabric were alike. Brackman has found the name in newspapers of 1873, 1875 and 1879, several of them for quilts of over a thousand pieces, and writes that few reached the goal; the museum in Lincoln has a hexagon quilt from 1887 with only a handful of repeats. The name charm four patch comes from the precut packs of 5" squares that fabric makers call charm packs today. We have found no sure source for when they appeared.

The four patch is sewn from four squares, or faster from two strips sewn together, cut across and turned. Set side by side the dark squares make diagonal chains across the quilt, as in the oldest quilt in Lincoln; on point they become diamonds.

It is a building block of larger blocks such as Jacob's Ladder and looks good alternating with Snowball or plain squares.