Block · Geese and triangles
Pinwheel
Four half-square triangles each turned a quarter round the middle, so the dark triangles stand like the sails of a windmill.
- Other names
- Windmill · Vindmølle
- Known from
- USA, from the 1830s
- First known print
- According to Barbara Brackman the oldest printed name for a four patch of triangles is Windmill, in the magazine Ohio Farmer in 1898.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Geese and triangles
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 2 × 2 cells
History
The block is older than the names. The museum in Lincoln has a Pinwheel quilt sewn by the Quaker Margaret M. Oyster in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with an embroidered year: 1833. The Spencer Museum of Art has a "Windmill" by Catherine Grabill Landis from 1840–1860, a simple block of dark and light triangles set on point.
The names Windmill and Pinwheel have covered many patterns. In the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898, Windmill, Pinwheel Star and Pinwheel Square are all other blocks, and in 1915 Marie Webster names Wind Mill and Pinwheel Square without showing them. The same four patch of triangles has also been called Broken Dishes, depending on how the triangles face.
How it is used
The block is four half-square triangles, which can be sewn two at a time from two squares. With the triangles turned differently it becomes Broken Dishes, and the Hourglass is its relative with four triangles in one square.
Set on point, as Landis' quilt, or with sashing between, each pinwheel stands alone; close together they make a new pattern where the light triangles meet.
Quilts with the block
Pinwheel
5 × 6 blocks · 55" × 64½"
Pinwheel on point
32 blocks on point · 44" × 52⅜"
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: Bird in Air (2015)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Pinwheel, Margaret M. Oyster, 1833
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: Windmill quilt, Catherine Grabill Landis
- Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)