CHECKERBOARD
Hudson River Esplanade, NYC
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Quilt Notes:
It might be a place to play chess or checkers, but as a geometric pattern a checkerboard is not a quilt design, it is a checkerboard, just as a circle cannot be called a quilt design — it can be used as one, but it still remains forever simply a circle. This is so obvious too in its illustration in the Ladies Art Company Catalogue #348, where it appears as Mosaic #20, simply as a crosshatch.
Nevertheless Beth Gutcheon's highly creative quilt design compendium titled THE PERFECT PATCHWORK PRIMER (1973) was one of the first to list the CHECKERBOARD (#7 & #294) as if it were something unique. And then in the block drawing she fills the darker squares with marvelously exotic and amorphic faux-fabric designs, as a sort of unorganized counterpoint, and claims it thereby as a patchwork pattern. Her suggestion for the type of fabric is borrowed here in the illustration upper right and in the tiling below. A different departure, upper left, simply breaks the monotony via color and dark and light.
As mentioned elsewhere, pieced quilt patterns themselves are often thought of as puzzles, and traditionally there are many references to popular games or forms of play in the naming of the designs, for example, at this site:
CHUCK-A_LUCK
DOMINO AND SQUARES
DOODLE-A_QUILT
FLYING SAUCER
HOPSCOTCH
LEAPFROG
MERRY-GO-ROUND
KALEIDOSCOPE
PUSS IN THE CORNER
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CHECKERBOARD
