At a craft show, a woman came up to me and said “Ohio Star.” At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then she said that Ohio Star would be well suited to my mosaics. I finally had the chance to try this pattern out, and it was indeed an enjoyable one!
From my research into the origins of this pattern, Ohio Star became popular in the mid-19th century, and is of the genre of variable stars, which take any number of configurations of squares and triangles. But like many quilt patterns, any more exact history is difficult to find. Marsha McCloskey’s book, Variable Star Quilts and How to Make Them, notes that “Variable Star” is an astronomy term, and means a star that varies greatly in its brightness, depending on its surroundings, and that it is a fitting name for a quilt block that varies in its coloration depending on the colors of the the surrounding blocks.
Check out this cool variable star from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, V838 Monocerotis(which means unicorn).
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Related Post:
Quilts of Glass: Log Cabin, Broken Dishes, and Perhaps Ohio Star
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