Cathy's Campfire

About this block

This block is built from flying geese units surrounding a center square, and its real story starts with someone else's quilt entirely. It's designer Marcia Hohn's own rendition of block A5 from the Jane A. Stickle quilt, a legendary sampler pieced in 1863 by a Vermont farmwife during the Civil War. Stickle, working largely alone on her farm while her husband was away, hand-drafted 169 tiny, entirely unique 5-inch blocks into one quilt, embroidering "In War Time 1863" into a corner and winning a county fair ribbon for it that same year. The quilt resurfaced in the popular imagination in 1996 when Brenda Papadakis published Dear Jane, a book charting and redrawing all 225 patterns found in the original, and the nickname stuck so completely that quilters now often call the antique quilt "Dear Jane" rather than by Stickle's own name for it. "Cathy's Campfire" is one of many modern reinterpretations built off that same block library, first published on Quilter's Cache in 2001.