Patchwork Quilting; Pick it APART!
With two patchwork quilting books new to the market, Gwen Marston’s “Liberated Quiltmaking II” and Jinny Beyer’s “The Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns:4050 Pieced Blocks for Quilters” [see previously posted reviews] I thought it a good time to talk a little about how one analyzes patchwork quilting by in a sense picking them apart. Knowing how to do that makes it easier to begin to make your own patterns rather than always relying on purchased ones. Now I know, patterns make it easy, I myself published a line of patchwork quilting patterns for over 25 years, but once you can look at any quilt block, decide what are the bare bones of the block… then the gloves come off and YOU are in charge!
There are major divisions that just about any good quiltmaking book or class will teach you. The first is patchwork quilting that is called one patch. That is when you use only one template for the entire quilt! That one shape will usually be a square, triangle, or a hexagon. Depending on fabric colorations and placement you can end up with an overall design. Think of the pattern “Grandmother’s Flower Garden” and you have pictured a one patch quilt made up of only one size hexagon!
When you get into patchwork quilting that are quilts made up of many duplicate blocks each block can be analyzed, broken down, into it’s main elements so that you can figure out what each section is made up of and how you might either totally duplicate it, or, if you are adventurous, change out the elements that you don’t quite like as well to replace them with your own! After all that is how patchwork quilting block patterns came to be! After all there are 4,050 or them named in Jinny’s new book! Of course if you don’t want to go to the bother her book categorizes them for you!
The first of these block divisions is known as a four patch. Why it isn’t called a two patch is beyond me, but like the nine patch they count all the squares rather than the number of rows and columns. So a four patch quilt block can be broken down like this:
and a classic example of a four patch quilt block is ”Jacobs Ladder”. You can see that the overall block is made up of four equal sized smaller squares, and you can even see that while two of them are made up of simple triangles, that the remaining small squares are four patches of their own! This quilt takes on all sorts of looks depending on fabric choices, and also placement of color.
Next we have the very classic Nine Patch. There are literally hundreds of them! One that you are sure to recognize, and is simple to piece, is a “Double Irish Chain”.
As you can see you have the nine patchwork quilting grid, and in alternating squares you have smaller, mini 9 patches. When these blocks are set together you have a quilt that takes on an overall pattern. In this case they actually make up a bigger nine patch of their own and a cute baby quilt. By adding more blocks together you can make whatever size quilt you like. And since YOU made the pattern yourself, YOU control the size of each block, and hence the size of the overall quilt! Notice in this example how the white appears as “holes”. The Amish might substitute the white for black which will make the green really POP! It’s fun to experiment!
Moving on to the Five Patch patchwork quilting block you see that these have five blocks across x five blocks down. What you can do with these blocks is almost limitless, but just one example is “Sister’s Choice” .
and as you can see by this b/w study of the block changing where you put the values of colors really makes a huge difference in how the block “reads”!
Lastly, lets look at Seven Patch patchwork quilting Blocks: the very traditional Bears Claw is a fine example.
By mere selection of fabrics the quilt can be very traditional, or it can take on a more modern look!
This is only a glimpse at just a FEW of many, MANY patchwork quilting patterns available to you in these block grids. Perhaps we will take a look in depth at them in the very near future! Be sure to stay tuned!
~MaggieB
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