Transform Strips of Fabric into Beautiful Baskets and Bowls! It’s a simple process to wrap strips of fabric around cotton clothesline. Then, coil and stitch the resulting cord into handy and decorative containers. Each one will be unique in color and shape, limited only by your imagination. Read through the following tutorials to learn about …

It's A Quilt Thing! Feather Fantasy_Shoofly block_1-L00931 - A Shoofly block based on a nine patch block. This file contains both the block pattern and a point to point

I recently shared a Disappearing Nine Patch block with some of my quilting friends that I had seen at sew-fantastic   We are going to be making a quilt of valour and thought about this technique for our pattern.  We met last week to start on our quilt (Be looking for future posts on our process).    Kay had made a simple nine patch square (imagine you can't see the cuts she made) and had cut it vertically and horizonally in the  middle. The large darker red in the center will become small squares and the medium red squares will be the same size or two together to form a rectangle. We played around with the four pieces a little, but Rita, another member of the group, had bought the recent copy of Fons and Porter quilting magazine as it had a feature article on quilts of valour and we decided we would make one of them.  The next day several of us were together again and I suggested that we see how many different ways we could rearrange the four pieces to make a quilt square.  Here are some pictures of what we came up with, our Disappearing Nine Patch Blocks.  The thing is you can see some cute possibilities for some quilt squares. This is one of my favorite designs.  It is also one of the easiest as you only have the one intersecting seam in the center to make sure you meet. I also really like the looks of this one.   These next two examples would be interesting if you made the original nine-patch with the four corners different prints that were close to the same color.  This one to the right is two halves of the next picture.  Thus when you add another block on either side, you will create the look of the block in the next picture.   It might be easier to visualize the look I am talking about with the four corners being different prints of the same color in this picture. As the block is formed with the four corners of the nine-patch as the center four of this block. Here is another look that would be pretty in a quilt. This pattern would be really interesting in a quilt, too.  You would have single small squares and then two diagonally from each other. This one is a smaller version of an earlier one.  I think I like this look better.  This one would look cute with a child's novelity print for the larger red square.  You would have to "fussy cut" it for the framed look, but worth the effort. This too is a smaller version of an earlier one I showed. I will definitely be using one or two of these in a quilt.  It was fun just moving the pieces around and seeing the possibilities with a Disappearing Nine-Patch Block.  Maybe you will, too.  Let me know if you do. UPDATE: I recently made a baby quilt using the disappearing nine patch. You can see it HERE. UPDATE: Here is another lap-size quilt I made using the pattern.

I love participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival because it gives me an opportunity to highlight some favorite quilts from when I first started blogging and had very few readers. This quilt has a sad story with a happy ending, which I am just going to copy here from my original post in 2009. This was the first quilt I made from vintage fabric. The prints are more 40's and 50's so the colors are brighter than some of my other quilts, and it's entirely hand pieced, which is unusual for this pattern since it's an easy pattern to sew on the machine. When I began to seriously quilt again about 8 years ago, I wanted to hand piece everything. When it came time for the quilting, I did a couple of rows and decided I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the piecing. I thought about the church ladies in Ohio who had finished the quilting on my first quilt, Morning Glory in the 70's (and several quilts for my mother and mother-in-law), and decided to contact them. Mrs. H responded that her group was still quilting and they would be pleased to finish my quilt. I packed up the quilt and mailed it the next day. About a month later I got it back and was so excited to take a look. Well, friends, you would not have believed what I found. The poor church ladies must have been really old by then because the quilt was a complete mess -- the stitches looked like a child had done them, there were really dark pencil lines from tracing the flower template, and the muslin back was covered with little blood stains. I was devastated! After I recovered from the shock, I started the process of taking out all of their quilting and doing it over -- one block at a time. Here's what I used: seam ripper, tweezers, a little cup of diluted Oxyclean, Q-tips, and a hairdryer -- it took about 6 months to complete. The good thing that happened was that I began to enjoy hand quilting, which is now my favorite part of the quilt-making process. Mrs. H and her friends were paid, and I never told them that I was unhappy with the result. They had done such beautiful work when they were younger, and it was sad that their vision had obviously deteriorated. I discovered after this quilt was done that one of my pieced blocks and two of the quilted flowers are turned the wrong direction. I couldn't really fix the pieced block, but I didn't change the flowers either which is kind of strange since I'm usually sort of a perfectionist about this type of thing. For some reason, it just doesn't bother me at all. 9-Patch and Snowball Martha Dellasega Gray, 2001 hand pieced, hand quilted 70 x 80

Several weeks ago some of the gals in my local quilt group and I explored the 4 patch stacked posie technique.  I didn't get pictures at the...

I recently made a 9 Patch Quilt and I couldn't believe how quickly it came together and how WELL it turned out! Let me tell you all about it!

I joined Amanda's Nine Patch a Day quilt along last April and finished the first half of the blocks in May and the second half of the blocks in June. I finally got around to piecing the top of the...

Almost three years ago (Man! How time flies!) I shared a post called  from a nine patch to a ...  of different blocks you could design fr...

Hello, happy Sunday to you all! My quilting mojo seems to have left me for now. Every time I sit down to sew I want to work on smaller,...

Week 2 of the Disappearing 9-patch quilt along is here! Today I will be showing you how to create the basic disappearing 9-patch block and other options.

Ten Years and Done by Marcia Kaylakie. Austin ARea Quilt Guild

Master making tiny nine patch quilt blocks to create heirloom quality quilts. In this post, I share tips to make tiny nine patch blocks and replicate an antique quilt.

Two traditional quilt blocks ~ a Spool Block and a Nine Patch Block ~ are all that are required to make this quilt; neither block is diffi...

Hi, all! Sunday has rolled around again - are you busy planning or working on your Hands2Help quilts?  And if this is the first ti...

Add another skill with this on point four patch quilt tutorial. Classic simple quilt design by Amy Smart of Diary of a Quilter.

Detailed step-by-step instructions for my favorite method of binding a quilt with durable double-fold binding tape and mitered corners.

All spray basted together

Hello and happy Thursday! I’ve been sewing some scrappy 9-patch blocks this week, and I realized that some readers might be interested in some tips on piecing this type of scrappy block. A scrappy 9-patch block was actually the first block I sewed.  I made it into a pillow after sewing the nine squares together…and […]