Block · Geese and triangles
Tall geese
A row of tall, narrow geese: a tall triangle between two side triangles.
- Other names
- Peaky and Spike · Høje gæs
- Known from
- The unit's name Peaky and Spike from the 1980s
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Geese and triangles
- Difficulty
- Hard · Curves and skewed angles, cut from templates
- Grid
- 4 × 2 cells
History
Tall Geese is our own descriptive name, and we have found no older pattern with this very row. The unit resembles Peaky and Spike: a square divided into one large pointed triangle and two small ones. According to Marti Michell, Doreen Speckmann named that pair of triangles in the 1980s, and she made them known among quilters with the books Pattern Play (1993) and Travels with Peaky and Spike (1999).
The quilt museum in Wisconsin tells that Speckmann used them to give an illusion of curves and that she won professional patchwork at the first AQS show in 1985. She died in 1999. In her work the unit is square; here it is twice as tall as it is wide, so it is a stretched relative and not her own.
How it is used
The triangles have slanted angles, so they are cut from a template. The unit takes up the room of a flying geese stood on end, and the row can be set as a strip of points.
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 Marti Michell: Chart 49: Half-Square Triangles and Eva (2016)
- Museum Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts: Doreen Speckmann Remembered (2020)