A Southern Design

 

Quilt by Minnie Parnham of Magnolia, Arkansas

Mid-20th-century

Minnie Manness Parnham (1896-1975)

from Family Search

What did Minnie call her quilt pattern?

She might have found the pattern in the Weekly Kansas City Star, which had an agricultural edition,
distributed in Arkansas and Oklahoma, home of Ida Best who sent the design to the pattern editor, published in September, 1950.

Most of the photos here are from online auctions and if there is a geographic source

 it's the South, the location of this one found in Alabama.

From the Arizona Project & the Quilt Index

From the Wyoming project---no geographic source.

A lot of color correction.

Volckening Collection

Some saw orderly squiggles marching diagonally; others....

It seems to have been a pattern passed around quilter to quilter in Southern circles rather than an established, published pattern. And I'd bet most people called it as snake.

Ollie Jean Lane of the Mississippi Quilt Association

was inspired by the design.

Ollie Jean Lane

If you like a lot more order---you can confine the curves in a four patch

like this one from 1900-1925 or so.

Another four-patch variation.

Here's a pattern for a 7-1/2" block from BlockBase+ (has

to fit on an 8-1/2" x 11 paper but you can resize it.) 

The pattern has a more popular relative with additional string piecing:

Kansas City Star, 1942

And see Denyse Schmidt's pattern for a fan:

http://www.dsquilts.com/fabric_and_patterns.asp?PageID=1455&fbclid=IwAR3_zeMex4JUVLHJZfq6LB3Eis0GHS6K6geOek_P7J-XkJVuwKo3paaLYlw

Two other relatives:

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2018/10/gypsy-trail-or-snake-in-hollow.html

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2020/06/odd-pattern-that-must-have-commercial.html