Block · Squares and four-patches
Irish Chain
Small squares that form diagonal chains across the whole quilt: one of the oldest orderly patchwork designs in American quilts.
- Other names
- Double Irish Chain
- Known from
- USA, from the early 1800s; popular throughout the 1800s and 1900s
- First known print
- As a quilt name in T. S. Arthur's story "The Quilting Party" of 1849. "Double Irish Chain" is in Marie Webster's list of 1915.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Brackman no.
- 1013
- Family
- Squares and four-patches
- Difficulty
- Easy · Squares and rectangles only
- Grid
- 5 × 5 cells
History
Barbara Brackman calls Irish Chain one of the earliest orderly patchwork designs in American quilts, and some quilts of the 1700s look very like it. The museum in Lincoln has a Double Irish Chain of 1853, made by Rhoda E. Smith Nutt in Benton, New York.
The colours follow the times: browns and blues before about 1840, red and green after, red and white late in the century, and solids in the 1900s. "Irish chain" was a familiar phrase before it was a quilt name: the surveyor's chain of 100 links. Brackman does not say the quilt was named after it.
How it is used
The chain comes from the colouring alone. In a Double Irish Chain a block of 5 × 5 squares alternates with a plain block with a square in each corner, in QuiltCrafter this block and Irish Chain, block between in turn. A Single Irish Chain is nine patches meeting diagonally, and a Triple Irish Chain has 7 × 7 squares.
The large plain areas between the chains were a favourite place to show fine quilting.
Quilts with the block
Irish Chain
5 × 7 blocks · 61" × 81"
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: Irish Chains (2011)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Civil War Quilts: Irish Chain (2011)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Double Irish Chain, Rhoda E. Smith Nutt, 1853
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)