"Monkey Wrench"—single-block variation

Patty Ann Williams, the matriarch of one of Wilcox County's most disadvantaged families, created one of the greatest surviving examples of improvisation, a single-block variation of a "Monkey Wrench" (also known as "Shoo Fly" or "Churn Dash"), a popular pattern in the area. The large-scale workings of Williams's quilt hint that improvisation, as aesthetic and technique, was consciously valued and transmitted, even when subsumed into "pattern."