Missouri Star

About this block

This is an unequal nine-patch built on a 4×4 grid, combining square-in-a-square and quarter-square triangle units, technically counting as both a four-patch and a nine-patch depending on how you read the grid. Quilt historian Barbara Brackman traces the name to the Nancy Cabot newspaper column in the Chicago Tribune, which used it in 1933, cataloging the block as #2154 in both BlockBase and her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. The block predates the modern Missouri Star Quilt Co. by decades, though the company's founder, Jenny Doan, brought it back into wide circulation through her tutorials in recent years.