Picking back up on the theme of the last couple of months, this month I thought we’d look at 16 patch blocks.  Whilst you can get some pretty complex blocks out of a 9 patch, by the time you move up to 16 or more patches, you can really go to town.  When you get up to the larger numbers of patches in a block, you also start getting merged sections, especially in the centres, which gives a whole new perspective again.

This is the most basic of 16 patch blocks, a simple 4 x 4 square grid:

Switch out some squares for HST units and you get the Starflower block, which I’ve been teaching a supersized version of recently:

Mixing up the centre a bit to add in some QST units gives a Martha Washington star.  In this example I’ve made the outer points on the star into flying geese units rather than individual HST units:

Now back to that Dutchman’s puzzle from the 4 patch week that I said could be seen both as a 4 or a 16 patch.  If you’re dividing things down to their smallest size, then there are 16 HST units in this block, it’s just that when they’re the same colour we choose to connect them to make flying geese units instead:

Here’s a Celtic Twist block that takes a bit to wrap your head around:

Can you see how you would split this up?  There are a lot of bits merging across boundaries between sections here, but the clues are in the corners.  Here’s how it actually splits down:

I hope these make sense, but if you have any questions, please let me know!