Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch Quilt Pattern

A new quilt pattern for you today – the Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt pattern. And just as the label suggests, this pattern is a fantastic, easy stash-buster incorporating the disappearing 9-patch block.

First, the nuts and bolts: the Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt pattern:

• Is a fat quarter friendly (FQ) quilt pattern, great for using up your fabric stash
• Has instructions for 5 quilt sizes: baby, throw, twin, queen and king
• Has instructions for all quilt sizes either with or without borders
• Has instructions for all quilt sizes to sew a 4-colour gradation, creating a fun colour wash across the quilts

To me, nothing looks more ‘patchworky’ than a random layout of disappearing nine-patch blocks. Lots of different fabrics teamed with the multiple square sizes and rectangles gives that really traditional patchwork look.

The Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch pattern can definitely be used to create a very traditional-looking patchwork quilt. Just choose a bunch of FQs in one colour (or a limited colour palette) and sew them all up as per the instructions. Don’t fuss about with fabric placement, just let them lie where they fall and enjoy that beautiful, random patchwork.

Once it’s done you can decide if you’d like to add a border or not.

If you’d like to add a little order to it all, the pattern includes instructions for a 4-colour gradation across the length of the quilt.

For this baby quilt sample I used yellow, orange, coral and purple. I was fairly liberal with my application of the colour labels, as you can see below. Some of my fabrics contained two main colours, and some pink snuck into my purple stack.

I think it all turned out quite fine. Let’s take a closer look at the samples I sewed up:

Soft Spring Version

As I mentioned, I made this Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt from 4 main colour groups: yellow, orange, coral and purple. All these fabrics came from stash, which is very satisfying. Some were full FQs, but others were only partial. The Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch pattern shows you how many of each colour to cut and how to lay them out to ensure a nice fade effect.

Once I’d sewn it all up I decided to add the border. Plain white was one option but in the end I decided to go with a very low volume print.

I sewed the backing for this one from fabrics I had in my stash, in colours that matched the top.

Once I’d basted the quilt I decided on a diagonal cross hatch quilting design. This was really easy to do just eyeballing the corners of the blocks. Of course you could use a ruler to mark guide lines with a hera marker or a water soluble pen if you want precision.

After the quilting I sewed up a scrappy binding roughly following the gradations across the quilt. I didn’t try to match the colours exactly because I don’t need that sort of stress in my life right now! If you use FQs the cutting instructions are designed to give a fabric remainder which you can use in your binding. Handy!

I machine sewed the binding down with a zigzag stitch (tutorial on how to do this, here). As the binding has all 4 colours in it there was a bit of pondering over which thread colour I should use. In the end I went with a nice tangerine colour. For some reason I had 3 full spools of this thread. Not sure why but at least I put a dent in one of them.

I really love the zigzag stitch for baby quilts as it looks playful and I know it will be hardy for the life of the quilt.

Modern Colour-Pop Version

This was a fun little adaptation of the pattern to make a low volume version with a small pop of colour. The pattern outlines how to make this baby quilt version. Essentially you need a bunch of low volume fabric and a bit of ‘wow’ fabric for the quilt top, border and binding.

I have quite an eclectic stash of low volume fabric and for this quilt I selected only those with predominantly grey, blue or green patterns. My ‘wow’ floral fabric is an old Rifle Paper Co. navy print, so it worked well with the low volumes.

This version of the pattern doesn’t require the same level of fabric placement consideration as the gradation version. I laid all the blocks out beforehand though, to ensure the colour-pop squares were somewhat evenly dispersed across the quilt.

Once I’d sewn all the patchwork together I cut borders and binding from yardage of the navy fabric.

The backing for this quilt was a plain grey grunge wideback (no piecing required, yay!).

When it came time to quilt this one I went with a double checkerboard effect. Again, I used the block seams as my guide, no lines were drawn. I used the width of my walking foot to quilt a line either side of all the block seam lines.

This is a great quilting design if you’re using a more loosely woven fabric (like some of the gorgeous warp and weft fabrics about at the moment), or linen. With the looser weave the seams can be less strong than those in quilting cotton, but quilting all these lines parallel to the seams gives them some additional strength. Anything that makes seams more secure is a good bet for a baby quilt in my eyes, those kids give quilts hell!

I used a machine zigzag to sew on this binding as well. I used a navy thread and it’s very hard to see it (and photograph it) but it’s there. Using the same border and binding fabrics makes it very hard to see any binding mistakes which is a nice change for once!

Ocean Version

This last sample is just a quilt top at the moment. My 10 year old chose all the fabrics from my stash for me. He was going for a seaside theme, with green, aqua, mid blue and navy as his four colour groups. I sewed this quilt top using the gradation instructions, just like the Soft Spring version.

All the Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch pattern quilts are generously sized (on the large side). Because of this, I’m holding this quilt top in reserve for use as a future baby quilt backing.

So there you have it – 3 different quilts from one easy pattern.

Would you like to get your stash out of the cupboard and into a beautiful quilt? Why not try the Easy Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt pattern? You can find it for sale here in my online shop.

Happy sewing!

Kirsty

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