My Quilty Musings: Project Quilting 15.4

'Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives' This was the opening line of the soap opera Days of Our Lives. When I was growing up, my grandmother was a big fan of that show, and always made sure that she was home to watch it. I never saw the reason why - missing one episode never seemed to make much difference, since the next one invariably showed much of the same content!

Anyway, I was originally going to write about the fact that soap operas like Days of Our Lives have disappeared from TV, then link that to the Disappearing Hourglass baby quilt that I made for this week's challenge.

But when I googled 'Days of Our Lives' to get more info, I was shocked to see that it is STILL being produced! So much for that take on the PQ 15.4 theme! The show is no longer broadcast on NBC, but it is available on their Peacock paid subscription service. Wow. My grandmother would be thrilled.

I guess that I could wax philosophical and talk about how time flies and seems to disappear and .... nah. I'm not in the mood to be morbid. Instead, I'm just going to ramble a bit about disappearing blocks. Skip to the end if you just want to see my Hourglass project.

A disappearing block is made when you make a traditional block, cut it up into pieces, rearrange the pieces and sew them back together to make a new block. So the original block has 'disappeared'.

The first disappearing block quilt that I remember seeing was a disappearing nine patch, which is made by cutting a nine patch block in half both ways. That gives you four blocks which you can then rearrange in different ways. But since the four blocks are identical, many of those arrangements look the same. You can make the variations look different by using different fabrics in different positions, but the basic structure is still the same.

Since the original disappearing nine patch, some very creative people have started cutting up other traditional blocks. For instance, instead of turning a nine patch block into a four patch block, why not turn a four patch block into a nine patch? Many of the simple traditional blocks are essentially four patch blocks. When you cut them into nine pieces, the resulting pieces aren't identical, so you can rearrange them into many, many more variations than what is possible with only four identical pieces.

Brita Nelson is one of those very creative people who has been playing around with the concept of disappearing blocks. She calls herself 'The Questioning Quilter'. She's turned traditional blocks like Hourglass and Pinwheel into hundreds of different Disappearing blocks. Plus, she's done all the math! Check out her blog post here and prepare to be amazed.

Now back to the challenge!

single Hourglass block

Disappearing Hourglass variation

Last year, I made a baby quilt for PQ 14.1 using the dark squares from a Fisher-Price themed layer cake and a white background. This week's challenge was the perfect opportunity to use up most of the rest of the layer cake by using the light squares and some navy blue solid from my stash. I made 12 hourglass blocks, then cut each one into nine pieces and rearranged them into one of the Disappearing Hourglass variations.

I tried a few different quilt layouts to see which one that I liked the best.

I was tempted to use this layout, because I really like the look of it. But when I viewed it from a distance it didn't look balanced. I think that it would work better as a square quilt rather than a rectangular one.