LeMoyne Stars

The quilt's story is its block's: read about LeMoyne Star.

The museum in Lincoln writes that quilters took up sashing in the 1830s, and that at first it was particular to American quilts. It is older, though: Barbara Brackman shows that John Lewis Krimmel's painting The Quilting Frolic of 1813 has a quilt with plain blocks, pieced sashing and cornerstones, and that in 1929 Ruth Finley called that kind of sashing, Garden Maze, "exceedingly popular in the early nineteenth century".

The album quilts, each block sewn by its giver, began in the Delaware Valley around 1842, and about 400 are known from the country round Baltimore from 1842–1858. The museum in Lincoln writes that quilters in the southern states in the late 1800s were especially fond of separating the blocks with horizontal and vertical strips, and it has a pinwheel quilt from Maryland from about 1865–1885 with 90 blocks parted by long strips.

Sashing gives each block air, and blocks that need not match point to point can stand side by side, as in an album quilt. Cornerstones in another colour make their own grid of dots across the quilt.