Disappearing Nine-Patch

So I've been intrigued with the disappearing 9-patch and disappearing 4-patch blocks ever since I first saw them. There are some really cool tutorials out there taking it a step further by cutting on the diagonal, but I wanted to start simple, which SO isn't me. So here's what I did:

I started out with some Christmas fabric (Flurry by Kate Spain for Moda). Rather than going the traditional red and green route, I wanted to pick out the blue candy and accent it with green. Below is my starting point. Ignore the red blocks for now.

My beginning nine-patch blocks and their disappearing counterparts

I photographed all my tries on the fly with my phone so the quality isn't great, but you get the idea. I just wasn't into the blue so I brought out the red. They both looked flat to me.

Blue with both greens disappearing 9-patchRed with both greens disappearing 9-patch

I tried combining the two and just using one green at a time.

Red and blue with light green disappearing 9-patch

 

I think I was getting closer with the dark green layout, but it still felt really "safe" so I threw them all together and came up with this:

Since I knew the block could be rearranged in all sorts of ways, I also tried out this:

Ribbon Candy layout for Disappearing 9-PatchAnd we had a winner! It made me think of Ribbon Candy so that's what I named it in my mind.

Now since I had cut one set of strips for each color sample, I decided to go ahead with piecing them all together. They would have just taken up space in the scrap bin if not. This left me with 32 4-patch blocks. I set them as one 4x5 quilt, and one 3x4 quilt.

So far I've only quilted the smaller one. I used the double meander, which creates a ribbon effect. This is the first quilt I've done since I upgraded the machine, and I figured something that didn't require precision to look good would be best. The machine runs SO much smoother than my old one, but I managed to maintain the 1/4" "ribbon" through most of it. 

 Thanks for stopping by!