Not a Nine Patch Pizzaz

Maybe a Four Patch Frenzy or a Four Patch Fizz?  I'll let you decide.  I went to the Quarterjack Quilters Exhibition at Merley House, near Wimborne.  I bottled out of taking any photos and now think afterwards that I should have done as it was a lovely exhibition and the venue itself (which was new to the group) was really lovely.  The group had worked on several projects which looked really good. I had taken away with me one idea though as several members of the group did quilts called "Nine Patch Pizzaz", which I later Googled, was from a book of the same name written by Judy Sisneros.  This uses large scale prints as large blocks arranged with nine patch blocks.

Last year I took part in "Another Little Quilt Swap" organised by Kate North and had a lovely little quilt from Mary in California, who also enclosed a fat quarter of "Welcome to Hollywood" fabric and this fabric seemed ideal.  You can read about the Swap here.   Nine patches seemed the wrong scale for the fabric that I had so reduced down to four patches, which worked better with the fabric

I originally pulled out 5 different fabrics to use, but got that down to 3 which seemed to work well with the colours

I cut out 6.5" squares from the quarter and also a couple of 3.5" sqaures.  There are also 3 rectangles that are 6.5" x 3.5" (made to 3.5" with the addition of one of the three fabrics) in different orientations.  I then made four patch blocks from the mix of all four fabrics. 

This improv piecing on an improv design board (a piece of fleece clipped over a dressmaking cutting board), I then sewed the blocks together in groups, then it quickly became a whole quilt top.

That kept me quiet all afternoon!  I've ended up with a quilt top of 24" long x 15" inches wide.  Compare with the arrangement I had to remove the blue/yellow four patches on the right hand side and cut a 6" square in half lengthways on the right because the bottom half was wider than the top half.  The fabric quarter had Welcome to at the bottom of the fabric and Hollywood at the top, so now I've brought the two together.  I used as much as I could and apart from the trimmings this is all I have left of the fat quarter

Not bad is it? I did rescue one of the balloons which will be appliqued on later and the flowers in the square I had to trim will come in useful for the quilt label.  I even found the perfect sized backing too