Thursday, January 15, 2015

Crazy Fun 9-Patch Quilt Blocks Text/image Tutorial



Crazy Fun 9-Patch Quilt Blocks

Begin with three 11” squares of good quality quilting cotton fabric—because it’s a scrappy block, the colors and prints don’t have to match at all, but I like to put a light, a bright and a darker valued selection. It makes the pattern show a little better. 




Using your rotary cutter and quilt ruler, cut an angled cut through all three squares at once.  There is no rule for this cut except make sure you have enough at the narrowest part to make a visible patch when it’s all finished.



  






Next take the top piece on the left side and put it on the bottom of the stack




Sew the narrow pieces onto the left side pieces, with a ¼” seam allowance.


Press the seams to one side and press the square open.  Re-stack the way they were before you sewed them.



Turn counter clockwise so the narrow piece is on the top, and make another angled cut down the right side..
 


 
Take the top left piece and move it to the bottom
 



To make it easier to keep the stacks in order, I flip each over to the left as I match the cut piece to the bigger piece.



As you press the seams, you will see that they often will be angled in the same direction



  . 
Fold the top one to the opposite direction when you sew it for a smoother flatter block. 



The next seamed and pressed open stack should look like this:

 









Cut again on the right side and… 


… move the top left piece again to the bottom.



Your three blocks  should look something like this:
 



Stack them again, rotate  and cut the last angled cut on the right and move the left piece again to the bottom.



The final blocks should be arranged like this, three diagonal patches should be the same:    

light










bright









darker
 









I sew them one after the other without cutting them apart so the order stays right, and...
I can press the seams all at once to the proper side, then clip the threads between the blocks and press them open.











On the seam side, one pair should go outward…
 



…and on the other side they should go inward.



The back of the finished block should be nice and neat.


Here are the three finished blocks

 

Crazy Fun Nine-Patch exploration result

The images in my previous post were not as helpful as I'd hoped, since, in real reality, the pieces are scrappy in nature, and each block is different, made of different materials and colors. The images I posted were all the same colors--but I was thinking that the basic underlying pattern would sort of show that way in a quilt.  It still may, if the quilt is seen from a distance, because then the values of the colors will be more important, but in general, on a bed, the patterns don't matter as much.

In addition, I went back and watched the video tutorial by Mary Porter of Fons and Porter, and at about 1:22, you can see the sample quilt she made, and the blocks are all different in orientation.  So, I have to get out of my box and relax a little, and let myself go "cray-cray" with these blocks! lol  I must say that all these blocks were for Swap-bot swaps, and the ones I have to make my quilt from now all came from other people, most of whom did their blocks "correctly", so I'm happy with that.  Sore more experimentation is in order to make a series of blocks using 1 color/print of the block the same in all the blocks, with the other 2 colors/prints being "scrappy" to see if I can make a pattern.  Should be interesting.


Here's the one "done wrong" block I did























Here are some of my "correct" blocks