Sruti & D9P

Hoorah, I'm shooting down UFO's!

I started this for a friend's baby girl Sruti a long time ago. Today I finished the i (see how the dot is a little heart?) and put borders around all the letters. I've learned to put a LOT more border than I think I need, because otherwise I don't have enough. I'd rather whack off what I don't need than try to add more.

The border/binding fabric has all the right colors, but I'm not sure I like it. It will just be a narrow border (about an inch). If I don't use this, I'll probably do a 1" border with the same solids in 3" to 4" pieces. The closeup below shows it better.

I think as a narrow border, that dotted fabric works. It's hard to tell when I just lay the unstitched blocks on a big piece of the fabric. Thoughts? That's a wonky piano key border, which I am really into these days -- and it uses up all those whacked off pieces!

Last post I promised to show what happens to a Disappearing 9 Patch (D9P) when it disappears.

Cut the 9 patch in half both vertically and horizontally. Measure carefully -- you're going to have to stitch these back together.

Then flip 2 pieces that are diagonally opposite from each other and stitch back together for a whole new block! Since I have lots of different greens and an uneven number of ants and blue and red watermelon squares, I will switch out the quarter-blocks with other cut D9P blocks until I get a pleasing design -- I don't want all the same greens together. I like some unity in the quilt, so all my centers are the same (watermelon seeds) and all the borders are green -- though scrappy greens. But if you keep the border squares the same, and the focus squares the same, then you might want to vary the centers to keep the quilt from being just plain boring!

That's what I did with this one -- all the border squares were the same bear footprint fabric, and most of the focus squares were bears (but don't you love the s'mores fabric? I just had enough for a few squares). So I varied the center squares among several brights and then switched out the small blocks before sewing them back together.

See now? This is why we all took science. This is the Law of Conservation of Matter at work! The Disappearing 9 Patch didn't really disappear, it just got rearranged into something else.