Rainbow 9-Patch Quilt Top

I finished getting the last borders on this last night. I pieced that square border randomly, at least I tried to, and there were lots of little segments that I didn't really like during the making process. This picture gives me some distance though and I really like how the border looks! And the rest of it too. There is that dark section in the lower right hand corner that I don't totally love, but overall I am happy with the rainbow effect and the bright colors. The quilt is kind of wrinkly/ripply in this photo but that's just because I was hurrying to get the picture before the wind blew! It went together really straight and smooth, if I do say so myself.
 

I am going to take a break from 9-patches after this one for a while. But that doesn't stop me from thinking about the next one. Next time I am planning on doing some limited color palette but I don't know which colors, yet. Ooh, and maybe gray sashing fabric, too.

If anyone is interested in making a quilt like this, I followed the quiltalong on Amanda Jean's blog. But this quilt only has 48 blocks instead of the 70 she used.

I have a couple of 9-patch projects from my past that I'm going to show you in the next couple days. One of them is really bad... just wait and see.

No Prints Allowed/Jane Stickle 9-Patch

Last night was the big reveal of our guild's No Prints Allowed quilt challenge. Back in December we were given charm packs of Robert Kaufman's Kona solids. The challenge was to make a quilt using at least a little bit of every color and not adding any print fabric.

Here's what I made:

I had been thinking about making my own version of the Jane Stickle quilt for a while... I decided this challenge would be a good time to try some of the blocks. I made 16 blocks from the pattern book, all 9-patch variations. One of them had a little bit of hand sewing (top right block), all the rest were sewn by machine.

Here's the back:

I thought about hand quilting it at first; I have done that on a lot of the smaller quilts I've made, but in the end I decided that would be crazy and take too long this time. I had fun with the machine quilting and am really happy with how the quilt turned out!

Here's a closeup of the quilting, with a quarter to show the scale (sometimes it is hard to tell from a photo how big these kinds of things are):

I strip pieced those tiny aqua 9-patches! I strip pieced several of the blocks actually. Anina's That Quilt blog is a great resource for the Jane Stickle quilt; she has posted directions for making each and every block on the blog and I am grateful for the time and effort she has put into it!

Here are some other blog posts about last night's meeting:

Deb Rowden's report on our guild, I think it was her first time coming.
Carla talks about her quilt and has pictures of several quilts from last night.
Nikki's entry was an art bag to hold big art projects made by her kids.
Jenifer's quilt "Don't Lead Where I Won't Follow"

The quilts were all so beautiful! Thanks again to Robert Kaufman for the gift of the charm packs!