Friendship Fan quilt block

Friendship Fan

September 13, 1933-Shared Material Adds Sentiment to Pieced Quilt was the title of Nancy Cabot's Chicago Tribune column today. She is talking about the Friendship Fan quilt block.

Yippee, another pieced block! The idea behind the Friendship Fan quilt block is to get fabric from your friends to make the blocks. I think that sounds like a lot of fun!

Nancy wrote, "you must beg your friends to furnish a little scrap of this or that gingham, or perhaps swap a bit of yours for a bit of theirs. Because to be a true "Friendship Fan" each rib of the fan should be cut from a piece of material that has been donated by some friend."

The antique quilt shown below uses a fan block similar to Nancy's Friendship Fan block. The difference is the use of a circle in the center probably due to the blocks each being turned a quarter turn to for a larger block.  Nancy's block has two rings in the center as shown above.

This is not a hard block to piece but I decided to paper piece mine. I think it just makes the small pieces a little more stable when sewing. Check out my paper piecing tutorial to see how I use this technique. No more holding everything up to the light! I paper pieced the blades of the fan and used templates for the two curved sections. You can download my pattern here. This is what the parts look like-

The Friendship Fan quilt block can also be found in Electric Quilt's Blockbase program as #3346. I changed that block a little to make the proportions more like Nancy's which is reflected in my downloadable pattern.

Tomorrow-Good Luck Block