Thursday 22 September 2011

Our Creative Space... Lazy Nine Patch

In the spirit of reducing my mountain of scraps, I've been doing some nine patches that may or may not become a bag. The nine patch is of course, pretty straitforward, but I'm not a quilter, so I googled to see if there was an easier way to do it. All the tutorials I saw envolved lots of pinning and ironing the seams in between. I like to be practical, or lazy, if you want, so I developed a way to do it with NO backstitching, NO pinning and NO ironing in between.


Lay your squares at the side of your sewing machine in the way you want it. I put the stitch length at 1.8. That makes tiny, tiny stitches, so that you won't need to backstitch. The numbers on the squares indicates the order of sewing them together.


Chainstitch squares 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6 together. DONT SEPARATE THE SQUARES.


Then, again chainstitch nrs 7,8 and 9 to squares 2,4 and 6. Again, DONT SEPARATE THE SQUARES.




Lay again your block on the table and fold row 1-2-7 on top of the middle row. Hold it at both sides and you will see that the tread between the squares acts like pins would do and the seams alternate and nestle almost on their own



Repeat with the other rows. If you had  the seams in the upper fabric going down in the previous row, coax them now gently up in this row.


This is the result.



And the back, Now iron!


As I said before, I am not a quilter, so maybe there are lots of folks doing it this way, but I haven't seen it explained so on line, so I wanted to share it with you. I use only reclaimed scraps,soft and slippery, but it took me less than two minutes to put the block together. If you use crisp quilting cotton I bet that you can do it in a minute!

See more creative spaces at Our Creative Spaces.

7 comments:

  1. I could have used these instructions earlier this week ... just finished a cushion cover and the instructions I had said to iron each seam individually. So I did!! But it took ages and wasn't much fun to do!

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  2. Great post on quilting, Estella! Thank you for that! I will use it in the future.

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  3. Great! Thanks for telling me that I don't have to iron the seams individually because I never do but never say it out loud either :))

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  4. great technique. Thank you for sharing!!

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  5. Very clever Estella! Thanks for sharing!! :)

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  6. thanks for sharing! Very clever!!!

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