Seeing Patterns

[I apologize in advance for the length of this blog post. I had a lot to cover and it got away from me.]

Human brains are wired to see patterns. It’s how we make sense of the world. What’s odd (and oddly fascinating) is that two people can look at exactly the same picture, collection of data, etc., and see vastly different patterns.

Speaking of brains, the universe is currently using mine as a playground. I should note that I like to spend about half an hour every night before bed looking at Pinterest. My theory is that doing so primes my subconscious to make all sorts of connections while I’m sleeping. When I get up in the morning, I spend another 30 minutes over coffee looking at Pinterest or Google image searches again. That’s when my brain is awake and ready to do some heavy lifting.

Thanks to Noon and Night, I am a bit obsessed with Laura Wheeler quilt patterns. Laura Wheeler is believed to be a fictitious character—much like Betty Crocker—whose quilt block designs appeared in publications in the US starting around 1933. Some Laura Wheeler blocks, like Cleopatra’s Fan, are popular enough that Accuquilt has made dies for them. Other Laura Wheeler blocks seem to have faded into oblivion. When Barbara Brackman writes about Laura Wheeler on her quilt history blog, Material Culture, her comments always seem to be tinged with a bit of exasperation. Many Laura Wheeler quilt blocks are overly complicated and designed in such a way that interesting secondary patterns would appear when the blocks were set together.

I wonder if the block in yesterday’s post was a Laura Wheeler block?

I purchased this wonderful book last year:

It’s a compilation of Laura Wheeler quilt blocks—just the block illustrations, no instructions—but Noon and Night is in there. The block from yesterday’s post is not, but Barbara Brackman notes that she thought she had found all of the Laura Wheeler/Alice Brooks quilt blocks and then several more surfaced.

I created a Pinterest board this morning to help me keep track of all this Laura Wheeler ephemera, and in my travels, I ran across this:

It appeared in the Burlington Free Press. (I didn’t crop the photo because the story of the opera costume designer that appears below the quilt is hilarious—see if you can zoom in enough to read it.) I looked at this clipping and thought, “What an attractive and easy quilt! I wonder if anyone has made that up? Look, the block is called ‘Beginner’s Choice,’ which makes sense as it appears to be on a 3 x 3 grid and comprised of squares and half-square triangles. And it only uses three fabrics! Definitely a win-win for a beginning quilter.”

I went and drew up the block in EQ8:

You’ll note that I only drew the 3 x 3 portion of the overall design, because it is this single block which rotates as it moves across the rows that creates the overall design.

The next thing I did was to search the web for a Laura Wheeler block called Beginner’s Choice. I did not see any blocks that looked like the one I drew, nor any finished quilts that looked like the one in the newspaper clipping, but I did find the Early Women Masters website with a block that looks like this:

The note accompanying this piecing grid indicates that this block appears in Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns, so I went and looked. Yes, it does, on page 145-12, where it is listed as being on a 6 x 6 grid.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t describe a block of that complexity as “beginner” anything. Theoretically, I think this 6 x 6 block could also be made using nothing but half-square triangles and squares, but it’s those trapezoid pieces that are throwing things off. (And one of my quibbles with this book is the use of patterned “fabric” in the illustrations, because I think it unnecessarily muddles the waters when it comes to deconstructing blocks.)

So I am left with a puzzle. I think the block that appears in the newspaper clipping is simple enough that it is deserving of the name “Beginner’s Choice.” How did the “Beginner’s Choice” block that appears on the website and in the Beyer book end up being so complicated?

I went back to the American Legacy Quilt Index book and indeed, an illustration of Laura Wheeler’s “Beginner’s Choice” block appears there:

I suppose that one could look at this illustration and assume that those chisel-shaped pieces forming the center blades of the pinwheel had to have been cut out of one piece of fabric rather than being formed by a square next to a half-square triangle. If that was the case, one also could be forgiven for assuming that other parts of the block had to be equally odd-shaped. After all, if it had been designed by Laura Wheeler, it couldn’t have been simple, right?

I’m going to test my theory (when I find 24 more hours in the day) and make up a wallhanging using the block I drew in EQ8. I think that with a small-scale print, it’s not going to be noticeable if that chisel portion is made with two pieces of fabric rather than a single piece.

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I did tie myself to my office chair this morning and worked on patterns and the website. Noon and Night will go up for sale some time this week, I think. I’m a bit stuck on what illustrations to add to the Cobbles pattern, so that one is on hold for the moment. The Cobbles quilt itself is bound and finished. I just need to get a photo. Hanging quilts off the loft railing in the new shop works really well—I tested that system over the weekend—but the lights are pretty bright in there and they tend to wash out the colors. I need to monkey around with only having one of the banks of lights on, I think.