Comfort Quilts

This is one of the small quilt tops made with the "disappearing 9-patch" pattern. Below I show the sequence of piecing, cutting and rearranging to come up with this. I don't know the origin of this pattern and basically put it together after hearing what it was. I understand there are You Tube visuals and many patterns out on the internet. My friend Peg said it was best to keep one constant color in the center so I added that criteria.

Whenever I am on vacation, I take along some mindless projects to do. They usually are my stack and whacks or using up some of my scrap fabric making comfort quilts. Since I cut up hundreds of squares and strips before I left, it was time to start putting them together. Up until yesterday, I had a pile of 200 of one kind of block and 75 of another made up. It was becoming increasingly boring to make those blocks and not know what they would look like put together.

A trek to Lowes and a purchase of a 4 x 8 foot insulation board (which they nicely cut in half for me) and then Joanns for some fleeces and now I have two design walls!! So the blocks have now been made into 8 quilt tops so far and I am inspired to make some more of the blocks. These tops will be made into quilts when I get home where there is a large stash of backing material and batting and donated to our Comfort Quilt project at GVQC. My goal is to have 30 tops done by the time I leave the beach.

You have to use a little imagination here and picture this as the nine patch. There are four different (or the same) novelty prints in the four corners. I used relatively matching solids or solid substitutes in the four alternating squares and some sort of red in the center. So just pretend that the reds are all the same and that those alternating rectangles are the same. It is your basic 9-patch cut vertically and horizontally in this case evenly. I used all 6 inch blocks so for each 9 squares, you will end up with four blocks (uneven four patches). Each blocks is about 8 1/4 inches finished.

If you want a nice even placement like the top quilt on this page, you just switch around the piles like this. All I did was switch the upper right with the lower left. I then treated the four blocks like a block and pieced the top.

This is a totally unplanned arrangement of random blocks. It got a little tricky as almost all the blocks of novelty fabric I had were directional (had a top and a bottom). This works too!

I have finished 7 of this style (the vanishing 9-patch) so far and have two more to go (all arranged but not sewn). I will add a small inner border and a border to all these to make them about 40 x 50 inches when finished.

This was the other style, the pattern for which I saw at a sewing day at Marcia's. Jeanne used it for one of her workshops. I call it a disappearing 4 patch as you just take a completed 4-patch and make cuts from the center seam and then turn around the rectangles and re-sew them as 9-patches. I found that it was really important to use pretty high contrast fabrics for the two fabrics in each of the four patches. Again, I started with 6 inch squares. When put together they would make 10 inch blocks. After repiecing, they become 9 inch blocks.