Rainbow Shadow 9-Patch

So, what have I been doing?!  What's taking me so long to post some more?!  Umm, well, I must tell you that with it being at the end of the school year, things are really crazy, though not as crazy as they will be when the "lazy days of summer" start. Whoever coined that phrase didn't have 7 kids!  Last Saturday, with all the other things that had to be done, my oldest daughter, a junior in HS, asked me if she needed to bring a present to a graduation party she'd been invited to that afternoon.  We quickly whipped out a "movie blanket" as we call them - a fleece, lap blanket and embroidered it.  The embroidery took a bit longer than we figured, but she made it, only an hour later than she planned. ;-)

Well, I am working on a quilt, but it's taking a while and I will show it to you when I've finished.  I am also trying to figure out the best way to do a tutorial on the process, so please bear with me.  But until it's done, I want to show you probably the quilt that I'm the most proud of.  This is one that took me years to design, and I've spent a bajillion hours making a pdf file on it for the center section, but have not finished the instructions for the border.  I'm afraid I'll never get back around to it now. SIGH!  But here it is:

I always wanted to do a shadow quilt, and I saw a single Irish Chain done in red, orange and yellow that inspired the flow from one color to another, but I love rainbow colors and figured a flow going through the spectrum would be what I wanted to do.  I, of course, had to make it more complicated than simply having the color flow in a 45 degree angle, so each 9-patch could all have the same color in it. All in all, there's a 9-patch within a 9-patch within a 9-patch within a 9-patch.  Each little square is 1" finished.  The center portion is 81" square.  The border is a pieced chain.  The corners were tricky to make them fit together and if you look closely you can see it's not perfect. Total dimension is 108" square.