Janes’s January Tutorials: Session 1, Part A

Hi, I’m Jane and I am using strips of fabric to make three totally different quilts.  This is Session 1, where I will cover the preliminaries and how to put together the first quilt. 

First you need to press your fabric and cut strips of equal width from all the fabrics you have chosen to go into the quilt.  Press your sewed-together strips. 

As you can see, I have already sewed several sets of strips together into groups of four.  All the quilts I am going to make will be from four strips sewed together.





Lay your sewed strips on the cutting table and cut them into strips.  The width you want to cut them is the same width you cut your original strips.  Now you will have four square block in each new strip that you cut.   Do not cut your entire piece of sewed strips, so you can have some left for the next projects.

We have our new strips with four blocks in each strip.  Place them on your design wall and mix them up with other strips to get a pleasing variety of fabrics in each group of four strips.  This makes a “sixteen patch” quilt block. 

 

I have made more blocks than I really need for my first quilt, but that is okay, because it allowed me to have plenty of variety in my sixteen patch blocks, and leaves me a few extra for my third quilt.

Before I start sewing these four strips together, I want to make sure that I alternate the pressed seams (on the back), so I can lock those seams together and get crisper looking seam joining on the top.   Let me say it this way:  when you sew two strips together make sure the seam allowances on the back of the one are going one way, while the ones on the back of the other are going the other way.  If you line up the one in the middle first, and pin it, you will see that the others pretty much line up.  This reduces bulk where the seams come together.

I chain pieced my strips together, to save thread and time.  It just seems to go faster when you chain piece.  This is especially true when you are starting to sew together a bunch of sixteen patch blocks.  It may look like a big chore ahead, but it goes much quicker if you 1) get going; and 2) chain piece.

 Press all of your finished blocks and place them on the design wall to view what you have created so far.  You can now feel a great sense of accomplishment, and the most intense part of the projects is complete.

Square up all your sixteen patch blocks with your ruler and rotary cutter.   They all need to be the same size square, so your quilt top will go together with ease.  I have chosen nine blocks to go into my sixteen patch quilt.  The others (I made a lot of extra) will go into the third quilt, so I am sitting them aside for now.

 Now that they are on your design wall, you need to decide if you are making your quilt top with your blocks straight across or on point.  I did my last sixteen patch quilt with the blocks arrange straight across with sashing in between, so this time I am going to do it “on point.”

I have broken Session 1 into two parts, because I want to show you how to sew together “on point” blocks.  That will be next time, so check back later to see the next installment.  Happy quilting!