Disappearing 16 Block Tutorial

 As any one that reads my blog knows when I have time I like to yack, and yack, and yack.  In one of my many conversations in blog land some one said something about Disappearing 16 Block. I love the Disappearing 9 block (used this on Dance of the Dragonfly) so I just had to figure out what this was.

Edit.  Originally this block came from http://happyquiltingmelissa.blogspot.com/ as part of a quilt along please follow that link for more details.

 Google being my friend I searched and Found a Tutorial from Sew We Quilt here is a link to her much better done tutorial but having the camera handy I took some pictures and you get a tutorial from me.  I decided to make my blocks 3 1/2 inches each (just got done doing a huge project in 2 1/2 and could not do that size again, or at least not for a while).

 My wife hates the Oranges, Bright Red's and Yellows I bought for my Last quilting project so while she is recovering from child birth, I went all out and I am making a bright orange quilt (or 3) I got a tad carried away cutting blocks.

 So being a good tutorial you need to figure out the proper number of blocks and cut out the proper amount of fabric.  This not being proper, I just kept cutting until Tanya walked into the room then I tried to hide the fabric while she just shrugged her shoulders.

 I do every thing in bulk so I took all of my fabric (have nearly 30 or so colors of fabricl).  I chain sewed every block to the one after (I shuffled kinda my fabric so that they are some what random)

 I then cut the pairs apart and sew those to each other to make rows of 4.

 I then Iron them flat and sewed 2 rows to each other.

 Then I sewed the sets of 2 rows to each other tell I now have blocks (lots of them) of 16 block's

 Then the trick to make things cool you simply take and cut the 16 block in half both directions to end up with 4 triangles.  At this point you can then mix and match the blocks.  You can sew them back together or you can sew them in other directions.

 I chose to take both 2 blocks (2 1/4 blocks) and sew them side to side to make a Diamond shaped block if turned right or left on the corners.

 But then my son Jared wandered by, so I got distracted and got Julia out to see if he could hold her again and show him how much she loves him.

 But as luck would have it Julia did not want to play my game and show her brother her love.  So she screamed instead.

More pictures of her here http://juliadawnhealey.blogspot.com/

 Distraction over here is 2 of the blocks I made.  You can see that I have yet to clipped the top left and bottom right corners.

 Now that my tutorial is over it was a beautiful day today out side and cleaned up the garden. (Well I made the kids clean the garden up they put all the dead plants from last year into the green waste trash can) And I got the Rototiller out of the garage and went to work tilling the garden.  To prove that I do more then just quilt I had Rebecca get a couple pictures of my work.  This is our garden and we try to plant between 20-40 tomato plants (we bottle the tomatoes) to make my fresh Spaghetti Sauce not that its time to start planting yet it should be back to 50 Sunday, its 80 today

 But we can plant some pea's and a few other things now.

 The Lawn Waste can was full (kids said they could not work any more lol) So I got Jared to help me out and pack it down some.

 It almost got hard to get him out.

 But he did finally get out.

 Dad though is now tired and had to take a short nap.  Here is Julia again trying to fall asleep before I could.

One last thing I got mail (after the nap). I was pleased to get this wonderful Pin Cushion that I won on the blog hop during st Patrick's' day.  It came from  Mary at http://www.hookedonneedles.com/  Now the wife and I are going for a short walk with Julia I wonder how far we will get before one of our neighbors come out and stop us to see the baby.