Every block on this page is a table, and every patch is a cell with a color and a   in it. Not one of them is a picture. If you don't believe me, try to save one the way you'd save a picture. There's nothing there to save.

This page is big, about 80K, because of all those cells. On a slow modem, go put the kettle on. The method is on the front page if you haven't read it yet.

Nine Patch

The first block every girl learned in my mother's day, and the first one I made, in 1940, out of feed sacks. Five turkey red patches and four muslin, three rows of three. Each patch is 36 dots square, so the block is 108. Nine cells in all. Here is every line of it, ready to copy:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0"
 cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#A31F1F" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#FFFAF0" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#A31F1F" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#FFFAF0" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#A31F1F" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#FFFAF0" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#A31F1F" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#FFFAF0" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#A31F1F" width="36"
 height="36">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

Change the colors in BGCOLOR and you have a different quilt. Put the red where the muslin is and the muslin where the red is, and you have the other half of a two-block quilt. That's how my mother made her first one, too, only with scissors.

Four Patch

Even simpler: two rows of two, indigo and muslin, 54 dots each. Four cells. It's what I start beginners on, in fabric and in HTML both. If you can make a Four Patch you can make anything on this page. It just takes longer.

Rail Fence

Four strips in each block, muslin, double pink, turkey red and madder brown, light to dark. This is four blocks, not one, because a single Rail Fence block is only stripes. It's turning every other block a quarter turn that makes the fence: follow the brown strip and you'll see it step down from the top left to the bottom right like a split-rail fence going down a hill. Each strip is 20 dots wide. 64 cells.

Log Cabin

A red square in the middle for the hearth fire, the way my mother told it and the way everybody's mother told it. Then the logs go around it, round and round, light on the top and right, dark on the bottom and left, so the block is half in sun and half in shade. Set a lot of Log Cabins together and you can turn them to make all kinds of patterns out of the light and dark halves. Ten patches across and ten down, 20 dots each, 100 cells. This one gave me the most trouble to count, and I recounted every row with a pencil.

Single Irish Chain

This isn't one block either. It's Nine Patches set with plain muslin blocks between them, like a checkerboard of blocks, five across and five down. The indigo squares meet corner to corner across the plain blocks and make a chain running in both directions. On a real quilt the plain blocks are where the fancy quilting goes, feathers or a wreath, and I can't do that here, so they stay plain. Fifteen patches across, 225 cells.

Ohio Star, in little squares

This is the one that took me three evenings. An Ohio Star is a nine-patch too: plain corners, a square in the middle, and four star-point patches, each one a square cut corner to corner both ways into four triangles. A cell can't be cut, so I pieced each patch from little squares, eight across and eight down, and colored them by which triangle they fell in, stepping along the diagonals. Where a little square sat right on a diagonal line, I gave it to the star, because a fat point looks better than a skinny one at this size.

Twenty-four little squares across and twenty-four down, 576 cells, and every one of them is 12 dots, which is smaller than a line of ordinary type. To make cells that small, I used the trick I explain on the sampler page. Squint at it from across the room and the stair steps go away. That's true of real quilts, too.

On to the sampler, or back to the method. If you piece a block of your own in cells, send me the address. I'd love to see it.