New life for 9 patch blocks.

Had some fun making nine-patch blocks for the mystery quilt I was working on, especially the ones where I fussy cut the fabric.

When I decided not to continue with the mystery quilt and focus on Long Time Gone,  I needed to find a way to still use these cute little nine patches:

There is a section of Long Time Gone called "Plus a Star" which measures 21 X 12 inches.  It was the perfect spot to substitute an alternate block where I could incorporate these 3 inch units.  I decided to pair them with 3" snowball blocks to fill out the space needed.

For the snowball blocks, I looked through my fabrics and chose light background fabrics with slightly larger, bolder prints that were hard to use in the other blocks.

After cutting the central squares from the lights, I paired each one with a dark:

 From each dark, I cut four smaller squares:

And then sewed a small dark square to each corner of the light center squares:

After ironing and trimming, I had my snowball blocks all made, and I paired them up with the ninepatches to get my snowball/ninepatch section:

I laid out all of the sections I have made so far.  Here is what my Long Time Gone quilt looks like now:

Is this really all going to come together in one quilt??

Here is a reminder of what  Jen Kingwell's quilt looks like on the pattern for Long Time Gone:

I'm definitely going for a more well-defined block pattern for my individual sections, compared to Jen's more modern, blended approach.

Number of pieces in the Snowball/Ninepatch section:  202
Number of pieces in Long Time Gone so far:  1391