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