Textiles: I-Spy Alphabet Quilt- Method & Design

Good old Blogger: it's just put up 6 photos for this posting without a murmur of dissent. This one shows how I took areas of one fabric and turned them into three differently-styled ninepatch blocks.

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This is the same thing: I pulled out golden hens for one block and black-and-white hens for the other. The strawberry block is in there because in real life, although I used the same plain green for the strawberries and the hens, it looks as though I used two different colours. I thought this, too would be a good art lesson for the recipient!

I've put this picture in because I felt it was rather unsuccessful as a ninepatch: the butterflies were too big.




Sometimes I used the same fabric in two different colourways.

This illustrates the process of making the ninepatch blocks. Wherever possible, for speed, I pieced strips, as in the 2 red and 1 blue blocks. So I would put 2x9" long strips together (e.g. fruit print + red), then next to one of the 9" strips (red) I'd put a 6" strip (fruit), and at the opposite end, next to the first (fruit) strip I'd put a 3" square (red). These would be pinned, stiitched and cut apart ready to be reassembled into the final block. In this photo the 'odd man out' has been cut off and the other 2 sets of squares need to be cut apart.

The black and brown/house fabrics were marked and cut as squares to begin with, to select particular areas of the design. The black squares were attached to a pink strip and pink square, while the brown/house block is entirely made up of individual squares.

This shows (front & back) 3 sets of 3 squares pinned together into the final block, ready for stitching. I've ironed the seams in different directions so that they lock together nicely when stitched: it doesn't seem to matter whether you press into the middle and out or all in the same direction on each strip, so long as each strip differs from the one next to it. I tend to do all one direction unless one of the fabrics is a plain, light colour, and then I press away from it.