Quilt names : ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’,

It’s a quilt name that stirs up images of wagons full of bonneted prairie ladies busily sewing while bumping across the endless Western frontier. “The hardships endured by the sturdy pioneers were constantly in the minds of the early American quilters and inspired many (quilt) names. ‘Rocky Road to Kansas,’ ‘Texas Tears,’ and ‘Rocky Road to California’, (all) have a great interest as they reveal to us the thoughts of our great-grandmothers over their quilting frames.” — Marie Webster, 1916. We now know this nostalgic image of wagons of quilters is simply charming fiction. The Kansas Quilt Documentation Project found no proof that “any pioneers taking the road to Kansas when it was truly rocky made (this) string quilt since the pattern appeared after railroads facilitated trips to Kansas.

The initial publication of a string-pieced Rocky Road to Kansas quilt pattern was not until the Ladies Art Company catalog in 1895. This was the first mail-order catalog of quilt blocks and included almost 300 patterns. Obviously, descriptive names like “X Block” and “String Star” are not dreamy and do not sell quilt patterns in the same way, so this romantic myth of “Quilts of The West” continues to roll on.

The main sections of the pattern involve easy sewing of strips, strings, or random pieces. But the background pieces were traditionally inset with Y seams, which can be tricky. Most quilters now split the background diamonds in half for simple piecing. For a more formal look, strip piecing can be used. One sews cut strips together and then slices the strip segments into four triangles or Vs for each block. Another name for this pattern is The Kite Block, first published in The Ohio Farmer (1897). It features four strip-pieced kites flying nose to nose (looking at the pattern from a different direction). I found a charming small-scale version of this pattern, circa 1890 from Lancaster County, PA, with red and Lancaster Blue centers, a yellow framing row, and a Double Pink background. This careful color placement and straight line or strip piecing in some areas help control what could be a very wild quilt.

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