New Ideas Archives ⋆ Page 4 of 51 ⋆ Scrapdash % %

When I first heard about this blog hop, all I could think of was the Randy Newman theme song for Monk “It’s a Jungle Out There”. I wanted to make some sort of urban block, so I looked through my collection of old blocks for inspiration. I came up with City Streets by Nancy Page. Be sure to see the blocks presented by the other designers at the bottom of this page. They might have a more traditional view of a jungle.

City Streets by Nancy Page — Graphic from the 1980 edition of **Maggie Malone’s 5,500 Quilt Block Designs**

Nancy Page was the pen name of Florence LaGanke Harris. She wrote a syndicated quilt pattern column that appeared in various newspapers during the 1930’s. She was a well known home economist that promoted a number of different home crafts in her columns, such as cooking and needlework.

In 1932, she began a series called the Nancy Page Tuesday Quilt Club. This was a series of designs for quilts. These patterns continued into the early 1940’s, but stopped during the paper shortage of WWII. When the war ended, she did not resume her column. She would have been about 60 or so. Perhaps she retired.

The City Streets Quilt Block

The City Streets block is typically described as a geometric design that resembles an aerial view of city blocks or a street grid. There is a variation of it that becomes a churn dash when set side-by-side but the original version looks more like courthouse steps.