One busy print, five solids, and a quilt where every second block is a plain square. That is the whole thing, and the reason it works is a number Ashley never says out loud: a nine patch made from 2 1/2 inch strips finishes at 6 inches, which is exactly what a 6 1/2 inch cut square finishes at. The two blocks are the same size, so they alternate without a single adjustment.
Ashley Tomlinson of Sunny Made is starting a run of videos on nine patches and Irish chains, and this is the first of them. She works from stash rather than from a kit, and she says so: the focal print she bought, the solids she had already, and the reminder that anyone could make the whole thing scrappy instead. She also admits on camera that she did the yardage in her head and forgot to write it down, and sends you to her blog post for the final numbers, which is more honest than most tutorials manage.
The strip piecing is the part to watch. Three 2 1/2 inch strips from each of five colors, twelve of the background, and she builds each strip set differently on purpose so no two nine patches come out the same. One set has color either side of white, the next has white either side of color, the third mixes two colors with white between them. Each set gives about seventeen segments, and she lines all three up on the mat offset by one line so she can cut through the lot in one pass.
The video went up in September 2026 on a channel of 8,550 subscribers, where her two previous tutorials passed 1,900 and 4,700 views inside a week.
What earns it a place even for a practiced quilter is the layout, not the block. She turns the alternating rows so the plain squares and the nine patches swap positions row to row, and because the focal print is loud and the nine patches quiet, the quilt reads as a scatter rather than a checkerboard. Her finished top came out at roughly 54 by 60 inches.
If you want the block written out, with cutting sizes for nine block sizes and the strip set arithmetic worked through, we wrote it in our guide to the nine patch quilt block.
The rest of Ashley's tutorials are on her channel at Sunny Made.
