Fun with Sew-a-long

Good morning everyone,

Happy spring!!!

I can only offer you indoor blooms and some longing-for-spring kitty gaze, as it is still very cold in my part of the world… but at least astronomy says it is starting!! We’ll take that and head back into the studio to sew!

Do you like quilt-a-longs and sew-a-longs with your internet friends all over the world? Do you participate?

I do LOVE them, albeit I can’t always participate or keep up with. But this time I am!!

Two of my favorite fabric designers, Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknell are hosting their second sew-a-long called Community Sampler and it is so much fun!!

You get complete instructions for a 12″ block every week, together with some great tips and short tutorials from Sharon (so lots to learn!) and then you can also follow progress and images from the community and be entered to win some amazing prizes too, just by sharing your photos on Instagram (not in Instagram? run and get your account – it is super-inspirational and supportive quilters universe!!).

We are three block into it all, fourth one released today!) but if you want to join, you can really catch up fast!!

Thought to show you my fabric choices, my blocks so far and actually a few tips I can share on techniques involved – stuff that works for me and it might help you too?

For this sampler I decided to use my precious advanced yardage/leftovers from coming-soon-to-your-LQS, super gorgeous, newest collection by my ever-so-talented friend Katarina Roccella , called Mediterraneo.

I mean – drooooool!!!!!!

Friends – the colors, the designs, the detail… it is just all so gorgeous!!! I was so honored to get some advanced yardage and make a quilt for the Market and I still have some extras to play, so Community Sampler is one of those things!

Picked a several prints that would work and decided to have it all on one, uniform background, so that required some yardage… I was considering among these three:

and picked the top one. You agree? (honestly I think either one would be just beautiful…)

So here is my first block – Kitty Corner!

And yes, I did catch the actual kitty on it too, as miss Tesla is always around me when I sew. She is just such a fearless cutie!

So, this block has 4-patches in the corners. How do you usually make 4-patches? Square by square or strip-piecing?

Me? Huge fan of strip-piecing!!

Here is what I do:

1. Make strip-sets in appropriate colors (if your block is just two colors, than it is all the same strip-set, but if it has 3 or 4 colors, you will need two different strip-sets. Here are mine:

I press seams to one side in majority of my piecing, I LOVE nested seams and precision they give, without a need for extensive pinning. In this case pressing them so they will be opposing in the block

To cross-cut these into segments that make the block, you can certainly do it each strip-set separately, but here is what I do:

1. Lay two strip-sets RIGHT sides together on top of each other, making sure that colors are opposing (in other words, as you lift the top one, it should look like your future 4-patch).

Make sure your seams are nested, as stiletto tip is showing.

As you are ready to cut, square-up one end of the strip-set (by aligning the horizontal line on the ruler with the SEAM of your strip-set),

You are now ready to cut the segments of the desired width (mine were 2.5″). Make sure you are always keeping that horizontal line on the ruler aligned with the seam, as well as the line on the edge that determines your size! Only if BOTH of those are aligned (stiletto pointing) you will have perfect, squared segments.

Once I have all of my segments cut, I DO NOT separate them!! These units are now perfectly positioned and ready to just -SEW!!

I stagger them like shown below and transfer to my sewing machine.

Line them up and chain-piece all of them in one swoop!

But WAIT! One more tip: see how I have no pins? The reason you can do this is a specific orientation of my top seam allowance – see how my top seam allowance (one you can see as you are starting to sew) is turned AWAY from me? That is what works! If you do it this way, your machine presser foot will “push” top and bottom pieces to “nest” and give you a perfect match of points. If your seam allowance was oriented to be towards you, your presser foot could possibly push them apart, hence no match. Of course if you would pin these, you solve that problem, but they way I do it – no pins needed, just some careful handling!

One chain-piecing later – here they are!! And perfect points too!!

OK, on to the second block – Dovecote!

This is such a fun block!! And yes, for the 9-patch in the middle, I used the exact same strip-piecing technique as I described above! It’s just three strips this time and TWO sets of seams to “nest”, but it works just the same (no pins!).

This block is also fun because you can have many different layouts for it. I played with them before sewing the block:

Which one is your favorite?

The third block is called Ribbon Star!

This one has one of my favorite units – three-triangle square.

You make it by making a set of HSTs first and then go for another round of HST making by pairing one HST you made in first round with one plain square. If you do it this way though, you will get a pair of mirror image units, like these

Ribbon Star uses two of each of these, as Sharon and Maureen designed it.

I was a bit distracted last night (watching Fixer Upper! ) and made twice as many units as I needed! Silly…

however, that also gave me a choice on how to make my Ribbon Star block! Here it is with original set of units

But if I use units of just ONE orientation (and not two of each), then you can have these

Fun, right?

I settled on this one:

So here is my tip for this block!

It has to do with one thing rarely liked by quilters – trimming and squaring-up blocks properly. Yes, I know… not a fan either, but it is important to do it properly, since that will give you a perfect block at the end!!

When you make these three-triangle units, they are slightly oversized. To trim them correctly, two things are important:

1. The center seam crossing needs to be exactly in the center

2. The diagonal seams need to go exactly into the corners

So here is how I do it:

1. First step is to position your ruler so that diagonal line of the ruler is exactly on the seam AND (very important), that 2 1/4″ mark is on that middle seam crossing. In this case, this unit needs to be 4 1/2″ so 2 1/4″ is the half, middle point. If you would make a unit in different size, it would be he half of that size.

You can see stiletto pointing to that 2 1/4″ mark and diagonal line of the ruler is on the (short) diagonal seam. I then trim left and top side of the square (I am a lefty, for all right handed folks this image would be flipped)

2. You then turn your block around (180 degrees) and position the ruler so that BOTH 4 1/2″ lines are aligned with RIGHT and BOTTOM edge of the block and diagonal is again lined up with the diagonal seam (stiletto and sewline pen pointing). Notice that now, that 2 1/4″ mark is automatically right on the middle seam crossing (yay!). You now trim again left and top sides of the block (if you are lefty)

And that will do it – perfect three-triangle unit! (and not so perfect photo(s)… sorry!! It was late and apparently I just didn’t quite see straight? 😂)

OK, hope this maybe helps some of you if you were struggling with squaring up?

Here are all three of my blocks so far:

So, if you didn’t already – come join us all with the fun-a-long sew-a-long , follow Maureen ( @maureencracknell ) and Sharon ( @sharonhollanddesigns ) on Instagram for all the updates, tips and tutorials and giveaways too – it is just a lot of fun!

I am off to finish work (yeah, wrote this quick on my lunch break) and then some Block #4 fun tonight,

Love,

Marija