Monday, October 17, 2011

9-Patch Starburst

This summer a pair of kids at our church, who are very special to me, got married. My thoughts began to wander, of course, to making a quilt for them. I had my heart set on making a 9-patch quilt sometime. It would be a quilt that used a 9-patch block alternating with a plain block and would have amazingly strong diagonal motion. I decided now would be a great time for this project.


I happened to have a whole box of 2 - 2.5 inch strips of mostly bright colors and a whole file box of white-on-white.

So the project began.
I pulled strips and made sure they were 2 inches wide. I made sure to include enough of each color to create 2 or 3 full 9-patches, as my vision for this quilt included each 9-patch being one colored fabric for the 5 squares and 4 squares of white-on-white.

I invited two friends over to the house - and we had quite an assembly-line going! I would pin strips together, the Machine Lady stitched and stitched anything I gave her, and the Ironing Board Lady (should I say "Ironing Broad"?) pressed the seam allowances away from the color. I pinned the next strips - and sent the fabric through the assembly line again.



















Once I had these strips of three fabrics, I cross-cut at 2 inches to make a stack like this:











which I sent back to the amazing Machine Lady who matched the corners perfectly - and made a huge stack of 9-patches.

The really clever thing about this quilt is the 5 inch blocks you sew between the 9-patches. Any errors in cutting, sewing, or ironing the 9-patch blocks were rectified as we used the white blocks as our guide for sewing. Each row came out even, straight, BEAUTIFUL!!


We had quite a bit of fun deciding where to place the blocks so that the colors had as much fun as possible. My daughter is the resident expert on color placement - so she was the constant advisor at this stage.








I'll show you the rest tomorrow.

CathyH

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