Apparently, a quilt top of 9-patch blocks can be quite attractive

This quilt project saw its first public appearance in June, when I shared what was on my sewing table just then.

It’s fascinating that I’d written this when I only had ten blocks ready: “My vision is to sew the nine-patch blocks together somewhat at random – only creating pools of colour that flow across the quilt surface.” – When you see the picture of the finished quilt top, you can see if I achieved that vision!

In my July greetings from the sewing table, I was completely taken by this project. This is what I said:
“I've been working my way through my many containers of leftover fabric pieces (they hold resource pieces, not scraps) and pulling out everything that's large enough to yield at least one 2" square. Quite often I find pieces large enough for me to cut three squares but not four. Why is that? It’s so inconvenient because I need two sets of four squares for each block.”

In that post, I described the process of making these blocks and shared several pictures of a set of 16 9-patches. I had some commentary to offer about all of them, too.

Here are a couple of photos from August time that I haven’t shared yet. In the first one, you can see 24 nine-patches in random order on the floor:

There aren’t 25 blocks because I always made two blocks at a time. One block had dark corners, and the other had light corners.

The two-at-a-time process was not for being able to alternate the two kinds of blocks across the quilt surface. Quite the opposite – I specifically did not intend to do that. But I still wanted to have roughly equal numbers of both types in the quilt.

And now the first reason why a quilt top of 9-patch blocks can be attractive: those blocks are so much fun to make!

I cut my squares gradually, in batches of four squares of each fabric. When there was a large enough pile of those sets of four squares, I paired the sets so one of them was dark and another was light. For each pair, I alternated between a dark and a light centre square from my odd-coloured pile. Here you can see one of the ways I planned the blocks before sewing the squares together:

I took a break in August and wasn’t at my sewing machine, so this project didn’t move forward. But as soon as September began, I got back into the swing of things, and before long I had all 320 blocks finished!

I sorted them into piles so that the blocks could easily become part of the design.

The piles were patiently waiting on the floor for four days before I finally started arranging the blocks into a design, starting with light, yellow, orange and reddish blocks:

I continued with lighter purples and from there moved on to blues:

I added rows gradually, checking that I wasn’t creating too many or too large areas of dark or light that had distinct straight edges. There is one such area in the picture above, but I moved a few blocks around, and so the distracting pattern is not as visible here:

This is what the quilt top looked like when I had laid out all the blocks that were in the sorted piles:

I had a good start, happily sewing blocks into rows. Everything was progressing so nicely, and I was already congratulating myself on my cleverness, but after I’d laid out the last row, there were three leftover blocks. I then – and only then – counted how many rows of blocks I had, and oh dear – I was missing one whole row. So I had to sew at least 13 more blocks.

And because I had already sewn a lot of the blocks into rows, I couldn’t just make the additional blocks in whatever colours. They had to fit seamlessly with the blocks in the four bottom rows because they had not yet been sewn into rows.

Before embarking on the task, I took a portrait photo of the blocks because the sunlight lit them up so prettily:

Eventually I had finished the extra batch of blocks and could arrange the remaining five rows. In this picture, you can see clearly how a row becomes about one block narrower when you sew it into one long strip:

Once the rows were finished, I pressed the seams between the blocks to one side, changing the pressing direction with every other row. It was lovely then to sew rows together because the seams nested so nicely.

I think these are two four-row sections waiting to be sewn together – so this is a picture I took fairly close to the end of assembling the quilt top:

The quilt top was finished one evening too late for me to take a proper picture of it. I folded it up so it wouldn’t be languishing on the floor during our trip to Eastern Finland to visit our daughter.

On the following morning though, the sun made a surprise appearance and I managed to get a few proper pictures of the finished quilt top before we had to leave. And goodness, now you can see how attractive a quilt top of 9-patch blocks really can be!

So many people asked me about the size of the little squares when I shared pictures of the quilt top on IG and Threads! So, anticipating your questions, here are the facts:

• I cut my squares 2” x 2”
• The squares were sewn into 9-patch blocks
• The quilt surface is 16 blocks x 20 blocks in size.

There are some dramatically dark blocks down in this corner. Purple really is such an effective colour in quilts!

One more picture where you can see almost the entire new quilt top. You can mentally fill in the missing corner using the above picture for reference.

I made the first blocks in June 2026, although I don’t remember the exact date. Perhaps sometime around Midsummer. I finished the quilt top on 23 September, so the whole thing took three months of calendar time. It’s worth remembering, though, that I took holidays in both June and August, and I have a full-time job the rest of the time. So don’t think that this was a particularly long or, indeed, demanding project. Quite the contrary!

Now I’m considering to make a pieced quilt back for this one. It’s a long time since I last made one! I’m not sure if this will come to anything though because it’s so much easier to just purchase fabric for the backing.

Also, I have a problem because I don’t want to use up fabrics so wastefully. But who knows! Maybe I’ll end up actually piecing a backing, for a change!

And soon enough, I’ll be taking this to Töölön Tilkkupaja to be longarm quilted, which is another fun part. It’s not a quilt until it’s quilted!

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