~For a friend~

Ever since I have seen the "Disappearing Nine-Patch" quilts around the sewing blogs, I have wanted to make one. The perfect opportunity came when my friend was having a baby shower. Only thing--I didn't quite finish it in time for the shower. Oh well...a little late was just fine. The baby still isn't here anyhow! :-)

Do you know who Paddington Bear is? I didn't. Since I'm not "up" on all the cartoons and characters, I asked the lady in the fabric store who Paddington Bear was. According to her, everyone should know who he is. (Well, excuse me!)


Paddington Bear

So one drizzly, gray afternoon, I snipped away with my scissors:



And then I made my nine patches. Each nine patch had a blue center square.



(And then I forgot to take any more pictures of the process! LOL)

After making the nine patches, you cut them in fourths, and then sew them back together again (tutorial found here). You can sew them randomly, as this quilter did (scroll down), or you can sew them in a pattern, like this. I chose to sew them into a pattern.

And this is the finished quilt! I really adore this quilt. It was a very fun project.





I finished it off by tying it with embroidery floss. Hand quilting would have been nice, but I wanted to get it to my friend before her son is in college! ;-)

While I was making this quilt, I was thinking of Hawaiian quilting. When American missionaries went to the Hawaiian islands, one of the things they did was teach the women to quilt. The Hawaiian women thought that the whole process of cutting and restructuring the fabric was a serious waste of time and fabric. So they came up with their own style of quilting.


(Image source)

I'm sure the Hawaiians would have thought this quilt even more laborious than the missionaries patterns! First you cut and sew, then you cut and sew again! But it is much faster to do it this way, then it would be to sew all those little rectangles and tiny squares together!