How I came to it

My mother taught me to quilt at our kitchen table in the spring of 1940, when I was twelve years old. We pieced a Nine Patch out of feed sacks. Chicken feed came in printed cotton sacks in those days, and you picked your feed by which print you wanted for a dress or a quilt. I have quilted ever since, through a marriage, four children, nine grandchildren and very nearly sixty years of evenings, and I thought I had seen every way there was to put a block together.

Then last Christmas our granddaughter Carmen, who is in her second year of college and studying to be a teacher, set up a computer for me in the back bedroom, next to my sewing machine. My husband Peter, who piloted towboats on the Ohio and the Tennessee for thirty-five years and does not trust anything with a plug, said it would be a dust catcher by Easter. In February I borrowed a book on making home pages from the public library. I read it the way I read a new pattern, every word, twice, before I cut anything.

The chapter on tables explained that a table is a grid of little boxes called cells, set edge to edge in rows, and that every cell can be given its own color. I put the book down on my lap and said out loud, to nobody, "Well, that's a Nine Patch." A table is piecing. The cells are the patches and the rows are the rows. There's even a setting for the seams.

That was seven months ago. Peter says I'm the only woman in Kentucky who quilts on a computer. I've told him plenty of quilters design on the computer now, with programs made for it. He says he means I'm the only one who does it the hard way, one cell at a time. He's right about that.

Quilters know Paducah for the big show every April, when the whole town fills up with quilters from all over, and for the quilt museum downtown. I have walked through that museum more times than I can count, and I never once thought I'd be making quilts out of HTML. But here we are, and I'll show you how.

The method

It isn't hard. It's only patient. Here is the whole of it.

1. One table for each block. Set the table's BORDER, CELLPADDING and CELLSPACING all to 0. BORDER draws a frame around every patch, CELLPADDING puts a margin inside each patch, and CELLSPACING leaves a gap between them. With all three at 0, the patches butt right up against each other like a seam pressed flat.

2. Every patch is one cell. A cell is a TD. Give every TD a BGCOLOR, which is your fabric, and a WIDTH and a HEIGHT, which is how big you cut it. You measure in dots on the screen instead of inches. Every row of patches is a TR.

3. Put   in every cell. That means "non-breaking space," a space the browser isn't allowed to throw away. Netscape won't color an empty cell. Leave one empty and in Netscape you get a hole where the page shows through. I found that out at the library, looking at my first Nine Patch on their computer with a bare square in the middle of it like a missing tooth.

4. Don't cut the patches too small. The   counts as a letter, and a cell can't be shorter than a line of type. With ordinary type, keep your patches 20 dots or bigger. On my sampler page I show how I go smaller.

5. There are no triangles. A table cell is always a rectangle. You can't cut one on the bias. So any block with a triangle in it, and that's most of the stars, has to be pieced from a lot of small squares stepping along the diagonal like a staircase, the way a cross-stitcher works. My Ohio Star is done that way.

Here are two patches side by side, a turkey red one and a muslin one. Copy this into Notepad, save it, and open it in your browser:

<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>
</tr>
</table>

And this is what it makes:

That's a seam. A Nine Patch is three TRs with three TDs in each, and you can see the whole thing, every stitch of it, on the blocks page.

My fabric

A cell holds one color, so there's no calico, no gingham, no little sprigs. Every block I make is in solids, the way the Amish quilts are, and I've found I like it. These are the colors I keep on my shelf, so to speak, with the codes you type into BGCOLOR. I picked them to look like the old fabrics I grew up with.

The page you're reading is muslin too, only a shade darker and warmer: #F5EBDC.

Where to go next

Six Blocks: the Nine Patch with its code written out, the Four Patch, the Rail Fence, the Log Cabin, a Single Irish Chain, and the Ohio Star in little squares.

The Sampler: sixteen blocks set together with sashing and cornerstones into a small quilt top, and how I made the patches smaller.

And if you'd like to see real quilts and real quilters, visit the Stitches & Stories Quilt Guild. They're about sixty quilters who have been meeting since 1991, they make comfort quilts for their county hospital, and they post a block of the month with the cutting and sewing written out. For October it's the Friendship Star, which they call a nine-patch in disguise, with four half-square triangles in it. I haven't tried that one in cells yet. It has triangles, and you know what that means.

Quilters have stopped by

times since February 1999. Thank you for coming.

Write to me: [email protected]
I answer every letter, though it may take me a day or two.
Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999
© 1999 Therese Karg. The old block patterns belong to everybody.