The Noon and Night Goose Chase

We live in an age of information at our fingertips—quite literally—so you would think that something as simple as a quilt block would not be able to evade capture. You would be wrong.

Last week, I ordered a CD from Amazon that is supposed to contain “all 1,001” quilt block patterns that appeared in the Kansas City Star from 1928 to 1961. The CD came yesterday and it does have 1,001 quilt block patterns on it. (I think it will be a useful resource.) However, Noon and Night is not among them, despite the note in Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns that Noon and Night is a Laura Wheeler block design that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1934.

Where is the discrepancy? I went back to the Beyer book and looked at her information about source material, specifically the Kansas City Star patterns. Beyer notes that “In all, there were 1068 patterns given in the newspaper, more than three quarters of which were pieced designs.” Aha! I don’t know who came up with the 1,001 number, but apparently, 67 patterns are still at large, Noon and Night among them.

I have scoured Pinterest, eBay, Etsy, and done various Google image searches, to no avail. This morning—because I couldn’t sleep at 3 a.m. due to the heat—I opened my iPad and did a quick Google search on “Laura Wheeler quilt block,” then clicked on the images link. As I was scrolling down, I spotted something:

Do you see it? Look at the middle of the picture. That’s the Noon and Night block. This link originally went to an eBay sale but now goes nowhere. I did a screenshot of the image to save it. Unfortunately, the resolution is so low that the only words I can make out are “Laura Wheeler Designs” and “Quilt in Light and Dark Scraps.”

This answers one question for me, at least. I wanted to know how the pattern was presented initially. Did the star points rotate or were they mirror-imaged? This appears to show the mirror-imaged version.

I’ve got an eBay search saved so that if anyone puts Kansas City Star quilt patterns up for sale, I get an alert. Maybe one of these days I’ll get my hands on an original print of this pattern. And maybe pigs will fly.

I did a lot of cutting yesterday for my version of this quilt. I may take a break today and do some prep work for the large Poppins bag. I looked at the class information again, but the store is offering it from 10-5 on a Sunday and a Monday in mid-September and that won’t work because of church. I don’t need the class to make the bag; I just thought it would be fun.

I can’t do much in the garden right now except run the sprinkler and pick raspberries. This heat is supposed to break by Tuesday, when the high is forecast to be 81. Still hot, in my opinion, but better than 97.