Description

8½” square (some versions list gauge as unimportant) seamed in blocks of 4 with the large leaves toward the center. The larger blocks are seamed together to make a counterpane (bedspread in US English).

History

The pattern was originally gifted to First Lady Grace Coolidge by Betsie Montague, president of the Home for Needy Confederate Women in Richmond, Virginia, and wife of Virginia Congressman and former governor Andrew Jackson Montague. The First Lady likened it to the sort of counterpane that her generation’s great-grandmothers would have knitted when she submitted it to the New York Herald Tribune.

During her lifetime Grace Coolidge contributed numerous articles, poems and knitting patterns to needlework and popular ladies magazines. This pattern, which she edited rather than wrote, was published in the February 1930 Needlecraft Magazine of Home Arts. Entitled “Great Grandmother’s Counterpane Takes on New Glory,” this pattern is described as a dear old pattern passed down from time immemorial. It is a variation of the four-leaf clover. The counterpane is now in the Prince of Wales Room (Lincoln Bedroom) in the White House.

Editions

New York Herald Tribune Sunday Edition, 1926

Cotton yarn
Steel needles, #17 (between modern US sizes 0000 and 00000, 1.25 mm and 1.0 mm)

Anne Orr First Edition, 1936

Size 10 crochet/knitting cotton thread
US 00 needles (1.75 mm)

Anne Orr Revised Edition, 1941

Info needed.

Piecework Edition, 2011

Size 10 crochet/knitting cotton thread
US 00 needles (1.75 mm)

Written in modern terms by Kristine Byrnes.

Stories in Stitches, 2013

Updated design by Ava Coleman published in the eBook Stories in Stitches 1. The Grace Coolidge Counterpane Motif can be used at any gauge with any yarn to create a bedspread of any size.

The eBook also includes the matching Grace Pillow Sham and Grace Triangle Shawl. See http://storiesinstitches.net for more information.