Quilt-a-Long, Part 2

Are you ready to start playing with all the fabric you've been cutting up? Me too! Today I'm going to tell/show you how to make 1 complete Pathway block. It's the only block you need for this quilt, so once you make one you'll know how to make them all.

The first step is actually to play with paper. We're going to draw a template on a piece of paper. Tape 2 pieces of paper together on the short end so you'll have one piece of paper that's nice and long.

1.  Draw a simple, gentle wave across the length of the paper with a pencil or marker. Use the picture below as a guide. The most important thing is to keep the curves gentle. Other than that there is no right or wrong for this; whatever you draw is correct. It does not have to match mine.

2.  Now cut along the wavy drawn line and also make another straight cut about 3" or so below your line. Easy peasy!

 This will give you a template that's about 3" x 16". Don't worry about the length; as long as it is at least 16" long or longer that's okay.
 

Now it's time to play with fabric! Remember those 16 x 10" rectangles of cream fabric you cut earlier? We're going to call these the B rectangles, that way I don't have to keep typing out those dimensions.

3. Fold a B rectangle 2" in along one 16" side with right sides together. If you wish you may pin this down. I did that at first, but then I just started taking them to the ironing board and pressed down a 2" fold.

4. Place your paper template onto the folded area and trace the wavy line onto the fabric using a water soluble or erasable fabric marking pencil/pen/chalk. I found this much easier to do if I didn't have the pins in the way holding the fold in place - that's why I started pressing the fold. NOTE: Make sure the curve is at least 1/4" from the folded edge to allow for the seam allowance.

A note on the marking pen you use. I am going to give a shameless plug to Pilot. They make a pen called the Frixon erasable gel pen. They may not have been intended for fabric use, but they work for marking fabric like nothing else I have ever tried. The best part is the marks stay as long as I need them and then a swipe of a warm iron and, viola, the marks are completely gone! Some fabric stores carry them, but a better (and probably cheaper, sorry to my local shop!) bet is an office supply store. I ordered a pack of 8 directly from Pilot with 6 different colors - 2 black pens - for a better price than I could find them singly here in Northern Virginia. (They didn't even charge shipping and that's all I ordered!)

5.  Now off we go to the sewing machine! Using a straight stitch, sew along the marked curvy line on the B rectangle. It does not matter if you don't follow it exactly. No one will ever know if you stayed on the line or not (especially if you use those nifty Frixon pens!)


If you wish you may press this stitching. I did it to remove my pen markings now, though pressing later would have done the job too.









6. Cut away the folded edge 1/4" from the stitching line. Remove those pesky pins if you still have them in. Using sharp scissors, clip and notch in the curved areas along the stitched seam allowance being careful not to snip your stitches. (clip in the dips and notch -cut a small vee - in the humps)

7. Carefully turn the stitched stitched facing edge to the wrong side to create a smooth edge. Use something with a blunt end, like a chopstick, to help and press the edge well. Check to make sure that none of your pen/pencil marks show through. Follow your product guidelines to remove the marks now if you have not already done so. Press the facing well so it is nice and flat.

8. Repeat for another B rectangle giving you two faced pieces. Your halfway to the finished block!

Now remember all those beautiful colored strips you cut from the fat quarters? I'm going to call them A strips - for the same lazy reason I call the other fabric B rectangles. Hey, if you know of a shortcut you should USE it.

9. Select one of your beautiful A strips and two faced B rectangles. Any A strip will work. Position and pin an A strip between the two Bs as shown in the photo below. Move the Bs to reveal as much of the A strip as you wish as long as you maintain at least 15 1/2" width (it can be wider not shorter). Pin in place.



10. Now at the sewing machine, edge stitch along the curved edges through all layers. The easiest way to do this is to use an edge stitch foot. It rides along the edge of the fabric and makes it super simple to keep the spacing even throughout. The one for my sewing machine, an Elna, looks like the one in the picture below.  The next picture is a closeup of the finished edges. If you don't own an edge foot, just straight stitch about 1/4" away from the folded edge as evenly as possible.

Here is what your Pathway block will look like from the right side.

Now there's only some trimming to do!

11. On the wrong side of your block, trim the excess A and B piece close to the seam allowance. Any sharp pair of scissors will work, just be careful not cut all the way through your block or you may wind up crying as you have to redo your wonderful block. I use applique scissors also called duckbilled scissors that have a very wide side that helps prevent mistakes like that.

12. Final trimming: Trim the entire block to 15 1/2" x 15 1/2". You may center the A strip or trim the block so it is off-center the choice is up to you, just make sure not to cut the block smaller than the given size. Ta-da! you have your first Pathway block done.

13. Repeat the steps to make a total of 30 blocks. Vary your A strips so you have as many different looking blocks as possible. Or ignore that completely and make them all the same A strips. Also if 30 blocks sound way too much, make yours smaller. It's your quilt, make it the way you want to!

Have fun! I'll have the next part (probably the last part!) in about a week. I want to give us all a chance to get enough blocks done so that you have a feel for the finished product. Happy quilting and keep looking for those things that sa(y) quilt to you!

Fussy Cutting

I've been collecting fabric for making a series of quilts with a wine theme. So I sat down the other day and started sketching out designs. Who knew that it could take all day to do this? I now fully understand why designers, amateur and professional alike have gone to computer-aided design (CAD). I love that; it gives great new meaning to the phrase "You're such a CAD!" Anyway, even though it's really fun to be surrounded by graph paper and piles of colored pencils, markers, and even crayons, it is so dag-gone slow! And, I'm pretty limited to solid colors. I don't know about you, but most of my fabrics are prints. One really important think to note: If you ever decide to play with design this way. Once you get the design down and are ready to play with color, take your original graph paper drawing and copy it. You can then try out different colors and not have to redraw the whole darn thing each time. I eventually came up with the idea of a table runner that would use a simple block, but the center would be a kaleidoscope. That's represented by the solid red square in the picture.

I had a cute fabric that was covered with gadgets for opening wine bottles that would be perfect. Making that center square was going to require a lot of fussy cutting. Fussy cutting - not when your fabric doesn't behave, that's a whole 'nother problem - is being very picky about what you cut out, choosing a particular motif on your fabric to highlight. In this case a square is divided into quarters and each quarter is cut from exactly the same motif on the fabric. It's not hard, but it does take planning.

I learned how to do it from Jinny Beyer, but I'm sure there are different ways of going about it. I take my template - a triangle in my case - find the motif on the fabric that I want to use and then copy some of the lines onto the template so I can always align it exactly the same way.

Then I trace around the template and cut out the resulting shape, here a triangle.



For my block I needed 4 triangles of exactly the same motif to make 1 block. The whole quilt called for 24 of these blocks. That's 96 triangles folks and a lot of fussy cutting. It leaves you with very holey fabric! You can imagine how hard it started to get near the end to find exactly the same motif in 4 different places.

I don't want to imply that for all 24 blocks that the resulting motif is the same. I would have to have a huge amount of fabric to do that. I was able to find the same motif about 12 times in the yardage that had - a little more than 1/2 yard. That would make 3 blocks. Then I switched to another one, until I had enough for my project. For this project that worked, but for others you would need more yardage to get the exact same motif for every block. For example it's not unusual for a pattern to call for 4 yards of fabric to be able to get enough repeats of the motif for a kaleidoscope block. My kaleidoscope block looks like this.

Very cute and just the look I wanted. My only problem: I had cut my triangle too small! When I made my template, I drew out my square with  the seam allowance on graph paper. Then I divided it into 4 equal triangles and that's what I copied onto template plastic. What I forgot is that I would be sewing those templates back together and I had not added THAT seam allowance back in to get the correct size. Aargh! Now I had 96 little triangles, and what in the world could I do with them? I tried to just make the block smaller, but the measurements were so far off that I would have gone crazy. Then I just made a simple 9-square block with the kaleidoscope square in the middle. It was still way too small. How could I make it bigger? Add strips of course! Strip therapy always comes in handy and here's the resulting block.

Not too bad for a mistake if I do say so myself. The lesson, keep on quilting. Even a mistake can sa(y) quilt!