Block · Stars
Kite Star
Four kites meeting with their long tips in the middle of the block.
- Other names
- Kite-stjerne
- Known from
- Related stars in the USA, from the early 1900s
- First known print
- We have found no print of this very block, with the tips inward.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Stars
- Difficulty
- Hard · Curves and skewed angles, cut from templates
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
Kite Star is our own name for the block. Its close relatives are four-point stars of four kites, but with the kites the other way round: the wide corner in the middle of the star and the long tip outward. Carrie Hall made one in the early 1900s for her collection of sample blocks, now at the Spencer Museum of Art, and that block's names say a lot: Job's Troubles, Four Point, Kite or Snowball.
A quilt blogger dates Nancy Cabot's Kite to the Chicago Tribune in July 1933 and also gives Periwinkle, Arkansas Snowflake and Humming Bird. Arkansas Snowflake is in the Kansas City Star in February 1935, according to both Barbara Brackman's list and the Old State House Museum in Arkansas. The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, has a Periwinkle by Frances M. Currie of Minnesota, dated 1937, and a Kaleidoscope from 1900–1920 with the same outline, but coloured as wedges.
How it is used
The kites have slanted sides, so they are cut from a template. Without sashing the kites' wide corners meet at the blocks' corners and make stars there; with sashing and cornerstones, as in Kite Star with sashing, each block stands on its own.
Quilts with the block
Kite Star with sashing
4 × 5 blocks · 53½" × 65"
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.
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Carrie A. Hall, Job's Troubles, Four Point, Kite or Snowball block
- Article Moore About Nancy (Nancy Cabot Sew Along): The Kite quilt block (2013)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Kansas City Star Quilt Patterns: A List (2020)
- Museum Old State House Museum, Arkansas: Quilt, "Snowflake/Four Points", Hattie Williams Jones
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Periwinkle, Frances M. Currie, 1937
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Kaleidoscope, possibly Pennsylvania, 1900–1920