Quilt · Overall
Tumbling Blocks
Cubes of three 60° diamonds in light, medium and dark, so the quilt seems built of boxes.
- Setting
- Overall
- Size
- 42" × 46¾"
- Known from
- England and USA, from the mid-1800s
- First known print
- Godey's Lady's Book printed the diamond pattern without a name in 1850 or 1851 (the sources differ on the year); the Ladies' Art Company sold it as Cube Work in 1898.
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
History
The figure is ancient: Cooper Hewitt mentions the same cube in ancient Greek mosaic floors. As a quilt it came with the "mosaic" patterns Godey's Lady's Book took from British magazines in the 1850s, and Barbara Brackman shows a cube quilt pieced over papers from dress scraps by Margaret Younglove Calvert in Kentucky, about 1850–1879.
The old names were Cube Work, Box Blocks and Diamond Cube; Marie Webster has none of those used today. When Tumbling Blocks and Baby Blocks were first printed, we have not found. Jonathan Holstein showed a Tumbling Blocks at the exhibition "Abstract Design in American Quilts" at the Whitney Museum in 1971 and compared it to op art.
How it is used
Three diamonds make a hexagon, and the illusion comes from the three always having the same place: light top, medium and dark side. Traditionally the diamonds are pieced over papers with Y-seams.
In QuiltCrafter the design lies on a triangle lattice, each diamond two triangles, so it can be sewn as rows of triangles without Y-seams, or as "Whole pieces" with diamonds. See also Thousand Pyramids and Grandmother's Flower Garden on the same lattice.
Related quilts
Sources
The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of the old quilts are in the museums' collections.
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Elegant Geometry: American and British Mosaic Patchwork
- Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: Tumbling Blocks (2018)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Margaret Younglove Calvert's Unusual Quilt (2020)
- 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)