Quilt · Overall
Spider Web
Triangles pieced from strips in bands, so the bands make rings round the middle like a spider's web.
- Setting
- Overall
- Size
- 60° block, Hexagon · 40" × 43¼"
- Known from
- USA, from the 1890s; string quilts mostly 1890–1920
- First known print
- The Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 (no. 191), there as an octagon of eight wedges; the name is also in Marie Webster's list of 1915.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
History
Spider Web belongs to the string quilts, where narrow scraps were sewn onto a foundation of newspaper or magazine pages. Barbara Brackman shows dated whirling string quilts from 1889 to the 1910s and writes that they were popular from the 1890s to about 1920. The museum in Lincoln has a Spider Web from Union County in Ohio of 1936 that began as a Pineapple Log Cabin and grew until the octagon was about 80" across.
The name has covered several patterns: in the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue Spider Web is an octagon of eight wedges, each cut across once, and in the 1930s the newspapers used the names Spider Web and Tangled Cobwebs for quite other blocks. QuiltCrafter's version is a hexagon of six triangles on the triangle lattice.
How it is used
Each triangle is divided into strips parallel to the hexagon's side, so the strips of the six triangles meet in rings. With the colours from dark in the middle to light outside the web stands out.
The strips are good for scraps, and they can be sewn onto a paper foundation, like the old string quilts. See also Hexagon kaleidoscope, where the triangles are divided another way.
Related quilts
Sources
The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of the old quilts are in the museums' collections.
- 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)
- Article Barbara Brackman: String Quilts #1: Memories (2019)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Whirling String Quilts (2024)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Spider Web, Union County, Ohio, 1936