Quilt · Overall
Thousand Pyramids
Equilateral triangles in rows, alternately point up and point down, so the whole quilt is one piece repeated.
- Setting
- Overall
- Size
- 40" × 48½"
- Known from
- USA, from about 1860; most 1870–1920
- First known print
- According to Barbara Brackman Ruth Finley's book Old Patchwork Quilts (1929); the same pattern was called Joseph's Coat by the Joseph Doyle Company about 1910.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Brackman no.
- 111a
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
History
The oldest dated one we have found is a doll quilt from New England from about 1860 at The Henry Ford. The museum in Lincoln has one from western Pennsylvania of 1870 and one from 1890–1900 that has also been called Land of the Pharaohs, and the Spencer Museum of Art one by Mary Allen Marshall of Buffalo Run in Pennsylvania, about 1880–1910.
Brackman gathers the pattern under one number with several names: Joseph's Coat, Mowing Machine and Thousand Pyramids. The name is neither in the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 nor in Marie Webster's list of 1915. The curator Jonathan Holstein has compared one of the old pyramid quilts to Lyonel Feininger's angular cityscapes.
How it is used
The quilt is one piece, a triangle, cut from strips the triangle's height, alternately up and down. At the sides each row's first and last become half triangles.
It was often sewn as a charm quilt, with no two triangles alike, and light and dark by turns bring out the pyramids. Brackman notes that many old "pyramid" quilts really have pointed isosceles triangles, not equilateral ones. The same lattice of triangles carries Tumbling Blocks and Sierpinski triangle.
Related quilts
Sources
The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of the old quilts are in the museums' collections.
- Article Barbara Brackman: Thousand Pyramids Charm Quilt (2014)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Tessellations 1: Triangle Patterns (2015)
- Museum The Henry Ford: 1000 Pyramids Doll Quilt, circa 1860
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Thousand Pyramids, western Pennsylvania, 1870
- Museum Spencer Museum of Art: 1000 Pyramids quilt, Mary Allen Marshall
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Thousand Pyramids, Pennsylvania, 1880–1900
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)