Recently I saw on a Facebook group when someone put up a top they had finished and it was a Double Irish Chain quilt but they said they didn’t know for sure what it was but maybe it was a Triple Irish Chain? I didn’t say anything. I know why she called it that - because there were three blocks of fabrics across. Seems natural to call it a triple Irish Chain, right?

Irish Chain or Single Irish Chain

I remember the first time I learned that a regular Single Irish Chain quilt was simply a 9 patch combined with a plain block where the backgrounds match and the corners of the 9 patch stand out.

Yes, that’s a simple Irish Chain. Once I realized how nice it looked, I made several. These were actually the first of the classic designs that I made.

Here you can easily see that the 9 patch block has pink squares and white squares. The alternating plain block is all white.

I also learned you can get a cool and fun effect when making the Single Irish Chain “on point”. Let me show you. This one is not quite as pure of a simple Single Irish chain on point, but has the same effect since the blocks are more than a simple 9 patch. Because the backgrounds are different colors, you can tell where the individual blocks stop and start. The one on the right is the pure Single Irish Chain on point.

I did make this basic look here in my 2” series. However, with this one, I used a rail fence as the alternate block (in light pastels) instead of a solid piece of fabric. So once again, technically probably not a Single Irish Chain on point.

Double Irish Chain

The Double Irish Chain was named first in 1897 and the first ones had an alternate block of white/color/white/color, etc They looked like this: If you step back from the picture, you can see that the chain part at the smallest point only has 2 blocks of color in the chain. Maybe it is more easily seen without the lines.

Not long after that, someone decided to add a dark color in the middle instead of the white or light and still call it Double Irish Chain. The first one was credited to a Jane Alan in 1932. I made a drawing for you and I’ve made one with some pinks. I’ll show you below.

Here is that same style but on point.

Double Irish Chain on point with a dark center

Triple Irish Chain

Next came the Triple Irish chain and while instead of 3 across (original had a color/white/color), there are now 5 little blocks across. Possibly original ones had color/white/color/white/color which then would count as “three” or triple Irish chain.

Anyway, to make that look nowadays, there are a variety of choices of layouts. . The first ones were published in 1929. I’ve made many of them.

You can play with your colors in this and still have it called a Triple Irish Chain.

With this, however, there opens up a lot of color possibilities. If you add some color to the edges, it can look like this on the right which I made from my 2” strips.

So far I have neither designed nor made a Triple Irish Chain on point.

This is what it would look like - but because on point blocks seem to take more space, I would probably need to do it with a smaller grid - so this is the 1” finished block look - queen size quilt — about a 95”x95” quilt.

If I made this with my 2.5” strips - this is what a queen sized quilt looks like. I’d probably want to stick something in the center of all that white for interest. Below shows a queen size quilt layout - about a 93”x93” with the little blocks finishing at 2”.

You can see this really doesn’t give a lot to look at on the quilt. Mostly white.

Here is a Triple Irish on point using 2.5” strips/squares with something in the center for interest.

I am working on some Irish Chains in 2.5” as a way to use up some of my 2.5” strips. I’ve been separating out my strips into colors. I thought I would just do a couple of bags but I’ve gotten on a roll so I just keep working on it and have huge bags of colored strips.

To summarize and to help you “see it better”, let me show you these side by side with the ‘chain’ links marked so you can tell from now on forevermore, which is which. Hope this helps!