The traditional element that forms the basis of this quilt is the nine patch. The name is pretty much self-explanatory. You sew together nine squares of the same size, easy peasy and they look like this:
Quilts made using this easy nine patch date back to the beginning of the 19th century. Nine Patch Quilt Patterns has a short history and a few examples of some early nine patch quilts.
The origins of the disappearing nine patch pattern are not certain, but it seems to have made it's first appearance in a book "Magic Pillows, Hidden Quilts" by Karin Hellaby. In that book Hellaby refers to the quilt pattern as "Nine Patch Magic". The book was published in 2002.
Now that I have the 19th century nine patch made, I get to bring it into the 21st century by cutting it into quarters, like so:
Today, I get to cut all 18 of the nine patches into quarters, and arrange them in order to sew them together.
I doubt I'll get to sewing them together today, but here's to hoping.
3 comments:
That's such a great idea! I love taking something old-fashioned and giving it just a little modern twist.
Here's the math that I think is pretty slick. You start with 81 squares, sew them together into nine patches (so there will be 9 of those) now cut each nine-patch into quarters (so now you have 36 of those). Toss one out and you have 35 which makes a 5x7 quilt, a nice ratio for quilts. The only niggle is that one you have to throw out. So let's do the number theory. Say you want to end up with a 5x7 quilt but without throwing away a piece, well then you should end up with 5m times 7m squares for some m. We're going to try to find the smallest m that will make this work. We have to be able to divide 35m^2 by 4, well then m^2 would have to be divisible by 4, so m could be 2. So you would start with 315 squares. Piece them together into 35 nine patches. Divide each nine patch into quarters to give you 140 squares you are going to sew together to get your quilt. It would be 4 times the work and probably wouldn't look as good, so it's probably better to live the the single lost square. Too bad 35 isn't divisible by 4 to begin with.
Neat. I agree that it is too bad you have to throw one out, but definitely more work not to.
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