Squares. Who doesn’t love squares? They have 4 equal sides and all those equal sides fit nicely together. Right?
Double Nine Patch is 9 squares. And, 5 of those squares are made up of nine tiny squares. Tiny squares that have sides measuring 1 and 7/8ths of an inch each. 1 & 7/8ths. Not 2 inches. No. Never can have even numbers. So we make a template. A tiny template. And, of course, a larger template because we still need those big squares.
Template making isn’t easy yet, but I’m determined to make it so. With the template we trace onto the fabric. This is easier with a fabric marking pen. Pen. Thank you, craft store gods, it’s a pen & not a pencil! It marks better. Lesson learned.
This lesson is all about the cutting. I cut out ten thousand and a million tiny squares (actually 45 tiny and 4 larger). I do this at the dining room table. I have a protective table cover (table pad, I think it’s called) to go over the table & then my cutting mat. This is nice, because I can sit & stand there & listen to the TV. I cut out ten bajillion tiny squares (45 + 4) while watching Big Bang Theory reruns one evening. After that is the sewing.
The sewing of straight lines isn’t so bad. But this is where you find out that your tiny squares are somehow not all the same size even though you used the same template for all of them. I blame the template (never the cutter or tracer, always the template), I’m sure it morphs like Plastic Man into different shapes. In the end, all the squares somehow go together. The sewing is fast. Super fast, even with ironing in between.
It was during the making of this block that I started to seriously question whether all the blocks will ultimately fit together into blanket form at the end. And then I remembered my Mom talking about a square ruler..a 12-inch square ruler. 50% off coupon in hand, I head to the craft store and now have as 12.5″ square ruler, which I can use to trim all the finished blocks into the proper size in case there are any lopsided edges among them. *whew*
The Double Nine Patch block wasn’t too bad, actually. It looks pretty close to the picture in the book.