Block · Pictures
Heart
A pieced heart of straight seams: two clipped humps above and a point below.
- Other names
- Hjerte
- Known from
- USA; appliquéd hearts from the 1840s, pieced with straight seams from about 1900
- First known print
- According to Barbara Brackman the paper Prairie Farmer printed a Broken Heart with straight seams in 1931. We have found no print of this very block.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Pictures
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 4 × 4 cells
History
The heart came first as appliqué. Barbara Brackman shows a block dated 1843 with hearts cut like paper cut-outs and writes that they are often seen in New York, but also in Ohio, Wales and Ireland. The earliest printed name for that kind is, she says, Friendship Quilt from the Ladies' Art Company about 1890, no. 180 in the catalogue of 1898.
Pieced hearts are according to Brackman mostly from the 1930s and 40s, and many of them are curved, like the Kansas City Star's Valentine Quilt of 1934. Closest to this block are the angular ones: Broken Heart in Prairie Farmer of 1931 and a hand-pieced Broken Hearts at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, from 1880–1920. Most alike of all is a Hearts & Flowers, pieced by machine by the family of Ernest B. Haight of David City, Nebraska, dated 1974.
The name can mislead: Hearts and Gizzards, which Marie Webster gives in 1915 and the Ladies' Art Company has as no. 125, has no hearts in either the catalogue's drawing or Carrie Hall's block.
How it is used
The block is squares and small triangles on 4 × 4 cells, so it can be cut with a ruler and without curves. Set with sashing and cornerstones, as in Hearts, each heart stands on its own.
Quilts with the block
Hearts
4 × 4 blocks · 56" × 56"
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: Heart Cut-Outs (2017)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Valentine Treat (2024)
- Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Happy Valentine's Day (2010)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Broken Heart (2020)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Broken Hearts, 1880–1920
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Hearts & Flowers, Ernest B. Haight family, 1974
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Hearts and Gizzard block
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Article Rosemary Sadez Friedman, Deseret News: Quilting Was Productive Social Event in 1800s (1992)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Weddings
- Article Barbara Brackman: Jackson's Heart: Not A Valentine (2023)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Freedom's Friends #3: Charity Still, Wreath of Hearts (2022)