Quilting Designs For Nine Patch Friends

I wanted to share how I figured out what to quilting designs to use on my Nine Patch Friends quilt.  It was not an original idea but something I learned by reading  Carla's Feathered Fibers blog and picked up the idea from her.   Here is a page on her blog where you can see and read how she plans her quilting designs plus she has a Yahoo Group called quiltwisperer that is about quilt design and machine quilting.  She has taught this as an online class and it sounds like a good class to take as we all can use help planning what and where to quilt.

The main gist of it is to use Photoshop Elements to draw the design possibilities on the top of a photo of the quilt.  Of course I didn't spend much time drawing since I am under the gun to get it finished but did like using this idea.  I am sure Carla has lots of other tips and tricks she teaches in her classes but my crude attempt helped me in this case.

I did change the design in the small border and revised the flower like shape I quilted in the light squares, but I am quilting a vine with leaves and tendrils in the other area though.  Like I said I was in a hurry to get started quilting on this piece.

Happy Quilting
Lynn

Nine Patch Friends

A few years ago, 3 friends and I went to visit another friend in Denver.  While there we went to see an exhibit of Amish quilts from the collection of Faith and Stephen Brown at the Denver Art Museum.  We were all fascinated by the "Nine Patch Crib Quilt" so decided to do an exchange of 9 patch blocks and see what we all could come up with.  Our only rules, if I remember them right were to make 5 blocks of 6 different solids for each person in the group.  There were 5 of us so that was a lot of blocks.  We were to use solid black in the same position and the finished blocks were to be 3".  A couple of the gals threw in a zinger or two which was fun.  I made extra blocks and remember I didn't use all the blocks I had - have no idea how many 9 patch blocks ended up in the quilt.

I finally got my top pieced together a couple years ago then ended up putting it my stack of UFOs as I didn't know how I was going to quilt it.  I did have fun arranging the blocks and love the light squares floating in the middle of the quilt. Three of the gals got their's pieced and quilted right away, don't know about the last gal but here I am getting mine finished now.

I pulled it out this last week and am working on machine quilting it now.  Have to get it finished by Thursday so it can count towards my 25 yards used for our guild challenge this year.

Happy Quilting,
Lynn