Trip Around the World

The oldest dated Trip Around the World in the museum in Lincoln is Mennonite, from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, 1875–1895. The museum also has one from Kansas City, finished about 1900 according to the family, sewn by Ida Pricilla Williams Giebner, one from Nebraska of 1924, and the Old State House Museum in Arkansas a "One Trip Around the World" from about 1940 by Maisie Shed Bennett.

Among the Amish it is called Sunshine and Shadow. The museum in Lincoln has Amish ones in wool from 1930–1950 and from 1960–1980, where the museum writes that the small squares were a good way to use scraps from dressmaking. Barbara Brackman calls the old "postage stamp" quilts of tiny squares a variation of the same. The name Trip Around the World is neither in the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 nor in Marie Webster's list of 1915, and when it was first printed we have not found.

The quilt is one square in one size, so it is quick to cut, and the colours do all the work: a ring per colour from the middle out, often from light to dark and back again.

Today it is often sewn from strips: the strips are sewn together in the colours' order, the band is sewn into a tube and cut into rings, and each ring is unpicked at a new place, so the colours move one square for each row. The same idea with strips of different widths gives Bargello.