This cheerful pastel pieced Broken Star quilt shows how a quiltmaker could execute a pattern with clear inspiration from the literature celebrating the “colonial” style while also being thrifty. The pattern, a favorite during the 1930s that consumers could purchase as a kit with die-cut pieces, was published and named “Broken Star” in a 1925 issue of Capper’s Weekly, a farm magazine from Kansas. Later it was offered as a free pattern inside a roll of Mountain Mist quilt batting. Attributed to rural Arkansas, this version has a faded printed label on the quilt’s back revealing its maker’s reuse of a feed or flour sack.

Pattern: 
Broken Star
Maker: 
Unidentified maker
Circa
1930
1950
Possibly made in
Arkansas
United States
69.5
54.5
IQM, Ardis and Robert James Collection
1997.007.0672