A sampler quilt is a quilt where every block is different, the way a girl's sampler in embroidery shows every stitch she knows. Mine has eight blocks, each made twice, once in the red colors and once in the indigo, set in a checkerboard so no two reds touch. It is all one table with sixteen little tables inside it, one for each block, and it is about 60K, so be patient with it on a modem.

Which block is which

The Chain is the corner-to-corner unit from an Irish Chain, crossed both ways, and the Checkerboard is a plain thirty-six patch. The pink squares in this list are the red blocks; the blue ones are the indigo.

Sashing and cornerstones

Sashing is the strip of fabric sewn between blocks to set them apart, and a cornerstone is the little square where two strips of sashing cross. Mine are green sashing and cheddar cornerstones. In the big table, every other row is sashing: a cornerstone cell 12 dots square, a sashing cell 72 wide and 12 tall, another cornerstone, and so on across. The rows in between go sashing, block, sashing, block, with each block in a cell of its own. The sashing runs all the way around the outside too, so it makes a narrow border.

Count it up: 16 blocks of 36 patches is 576 patches, plus 40 strips of sashing and 25 cornerstones, 641 pieces in all. The whole top is 348 dots across, which fits on any screen I know of. If I pieced it in fabric at two inches a patch, it would come out 58 inches square, a nice lap quilt.

Making the patches smaller

On the front page I said a cell can't be shorter than a line of type, because of the   inside it. These patches are only 12 dots, and ordinary type is taller than that, so the rows would stretch and the blocks would come out tall and skinny.

The fix is to make the type smaller. I put <FONT SIZE=1> around the &nbsp; in every single cell, like this:

<td bgcolor="#3F6B3A"
 width="12" height="12"><font
 size="1">&nbsp;</font></td>

It has to go in every cell, because Netscape forgets a FONT tag at the door of a table and won't carry it inside. Then I put one more <FONT SIZE=1> around the outside of the whole quilt, too. Carmen says some browsers measure a row by the type outside the table, and with it both places, the patches come out square on every computer we've looked at. Size 1 is the smallest type there is, so 12 dots is as small as a patch can go this way.

It made the page twice as long to type. I copied and pasted a great deal.

Why there's no star

I tried. The Ohio Star on the blocks page needs eight little squares across each star point to look like a star at all. In a sampler block only six patches across, each star point gets two little squares, and the points turn into a plus sign. It looked like a first-aid kit. So the stars stay on the blocks page, and the sampler gets the blocks that are made of squares to begin with.

Next I'd like to piece the whole Single Irish Chain as a full quilt top, with a proper border. Peter has asked whether I intend to do that before or after I make him the real quilt I promised him in 1994. I have told him I'm working on it.