Nine Patch Photo Quilt

Traditional quilt patchwork with printed photos makes a great memory quilt. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Traditional quilt patchwork with printed photos makes a great memory quilt. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Nine Patch Photo Quilt

If you are just starting to make handmade quilts, you will recognize this basic, beginning patchwork quilt design, the nine patch. This beginning patchwork handmade quilt design features a basic design with nine same size boxes. To change the design, the quilter selects different colored fabrics, sometimes adding multi-patterned cottons with solids or multi-patterned cottons with solid colored fabrics.

This is an updated tribute to those first handmade quilts only this handmade quilt uses the nine patch for the corners and incorporates photo memories as the main handmade quilt blocks.

The customer for this handmade quilt embellished her photo blocks with cute stickers that represented the people in the handmade quilt blocks, from flowers to books and other mementos.

These photos blocks had embelishments on the corners. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

These photos blocks had embelishments on the corners. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

A small multi-patterned pink cotton with small white flowers merged the photo quilt blocks into the overall pattern. Sometimes it is challenging to select the right fabric but we advise to pick something simple and neutral so the custom photo blocks stand out on the handmade quilt.

The custom photo quilt blocks were printed as the customer provided them. They were designed on standard 8.5 x 11 inch white paper and we cut the quilt blocks down to size. We use a unique printable muslin cotton that nicely maintains the photo colors through cold water washing.

In case you are wondering, all of the original photos are returned once they are printed onto our custom photo fabric.

Here’s the handmade nine patch photo quilt top ready for quilting. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Here’s the handmade nine patch photo quilt top ready for quilting. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

The customer also provided the photo layout so they had each one of the photo memories in the right spots on the handmade quilt.

I can imagine a child spread across this handmade photo quilt pouring over the photos, can’t you?

Charlotte