Accuquilt for Cutting my Scrap Fabrics

hi this is Jodi back from Jodi's gems quilting today I'm going to share why I bought an a Q quilt and how I use it which is not different from most people I do a lot of scrappy quilts people give me bags of scraps and I used to cut them all press them all press them all first of course then cut them all into squares rectangles whatever I need it end strips whatever came out of it and so what I'm gonna do is show you what I've done with that recently a couple of years ago our guild was challenged to go through our scraps clean them up get them used up and make charity quilts so I came up with a whole bunch of different ideas I didn't have time to go through all my scrap quilt books so I created my own and I'm going to show you some of those you can go to my website and see my patterns at Jodi's Gems quilting calm that's two J's and two S's these are a sample of some of my patterns if you're cutting strips which my mom loves the Accu quilt for that because they cut borders for quilts they'd she does a lot of quilts of Valor and at 80 years old 80 Plus that's what I'm my family and I decided to get her for Christmas one year as I was investigating I was like oh my gosh I think I need one of these and so I'm really excited that we both got one but if you're doing strips you can use them for the log-cabin cross they do have a die for rag quilts which they recycled memories is comes in 14 different sizes I believe and I do have a circle cutter that I bought last year to do some applique which is pretty rare for me the quilts still waiting to be finished but you could use the circles for yo-yos or yo-yos on this buggy wheels quilt pattern you can also these are with squares the crazy four patches and crazy nine patches which have been very very popular and then I came up with scrappy squares one two three and four and soon to be 5 and I just did all the math for you so whether you take charm packs and you cut them into squares or you have scraps that you're literally using this will help you with that so let's get started over the years actually I love this this is two kitchen cabinets that came from a reuse it or a recycled place and I love it and then I this is a kitchen table and it didn't have legs I said I don't care about the legs and so I created a sewing cutting table for myself I also elevated it on pieces of leftover flooring and then I can slide my mats in and out underneath it the humidity has them stuck today so underneath I love it because I can put all of my squares after they're cut so I cut put my squares in here they're all organized by size and at one time all my squares fit in here since then on these bigger ones everything from six six and a half actually five five and a half six six and a half seven seven and a half eight eight and a half nine nine and a half tent and they have all the way up to twelve and a half inches I put the bigger ones in here and then I took all the smaller ones and put them into decorator boxes and and set them on a shelf so I love that I also found this rack at a thrift store and I was like oh my gosh this is so cool so I organized all of my strips and these are just leftovers I have a quilt that's waiting to be written a design that I'm excited about and it uses all these strips this side I it's full of nothing right now basically just junk but it was triangles stripped small strips they were all by size so I had one inch two inch three inch and so on one and a half inch and then the triangles so that kind of helps organize it you always want a pillowcase or a small bag that you can put your this is literally too small to use for anything so scraps go in here and then I stitch it up and use it for dog beds and cat beds for the shelter this is also my little bucket that I have on top that's just full of schnibbles that I don't use either and I actually passed them on to a friend of mine Breda who does crumb quilts first and then after she's done then they go to the dog beds but anyway if you're doing any strips I did watch some videos or some great YouTube videos out there and so this is what I had done with it after I watched the video you're doing the stirrups you can also use this to cut squares and I do two and a half inch strips for binding maybe for an inner border just a variety of things and so what I discovered was it makes a lot of sense to go ahead and draw more lines on here so these are lines just for registration so that when you cut your strip you have it straight going one way if you want to cut it into squares and you take those strips and you would line them up on a registration line and zigzag it back and forth just like this that's two layers three layers times two is six so I have six pieces of fabric then I can do another one here I can do another one here I could do another one here I left a space I guess they're two and a half inches apart and you just line them all up lay them in there and then you can send it through and you have a ton of two and a half inch squares if you're making a quilt that needs that you could do the same with a three and a half and basically when you get your pieces lined up you just set this on top actually you know what that's not true these are not two and a half because this is not a two and a half inch strip I was going to cut it down to that this is actually a three inch strip so when I set these up going this way I put three inches between my registration lines and all I did was draw it with a pen you'll see these here are also down beyond and that's because sometimes you'll have a longer strip so you when you line it up on here there you go you want to make sure that your pieces if you stopped here and you didn't have these registration lines down here it would be hard to see where the strip is if it makes sure it's all in between then you just lay this on top and you run it through the machine I also discovered that the mats do wear out fairly quickly my girl I have a girlfriend who does not quilt she does not sew and but she does like to press fabric and she was looking for something to do and so I gave her my a cue quilt sent her home with all my scraps and she cut and cut and cut and cut and cut and will help my mattes in no time so I got this long one because if you have a really heavy-duty scissors you can actually cut that down to any size and it does save you a little bit of money now this let me show you I somebody told me it's a dryer rack like in your dryer so if you have a dryer rec you don't use get it out and use it for strips let me take you over to the rest of the story sometimes when you'll get scraps if you're done with a project you just throw them in a wide that's what most people do and let me tell you it is so much work I spent one whole winter pressing my scraps and I have girlfriends at Gill to give them to me and so now I give them containers I give them boxes I give them things that they can organize them take them home I give it to them empty and they bring them back to me full so they can put strips in here they can stack up squares they can this one is a bag of schnibbles and so that'll probably just go into the dog beds she gave me this bag and this is odds and ends but the nice part is is that they're pretty flat I don't have to do a lot to get them ready to go these would be flat these i think we're just i might have actually bought these sometimes you can get these at a guild like trash to treasure where the squares are all cut but they're pressed so they're nicely ready to go this is another stack that just needs to be measured and so I organized everything so that I can quickly use it if I'm doing applique if I'm doing testing a new pattern you know you buy a pattern and you're like oh my gosh do I like this I don't know am I gonna like this I don't know so this helps a lot then this is my stack Genelia Macbeth came and did a lecture for us and she talks a lot about scrap quilting and so she suggests getting a bowl well I got a big bowl she wants you to get a bowl that you filled with 20 minutes worth of cutting so that you can cut those scraps and you keep on top of it I do have a bowl it's a pretty bowl it's clear with some design so I can see what's in there it used to sit on my cutting table and that way I could just quickly when I had a few minutes I could just cut and keep up with it now the other thing is that I've got here besides a mess that needs to be pressed is this is what I do when I'm done with a quilt and I'm cutting off the backing these are all backings I just cut off the other day and so if you keep them somewhat clean and neat then you don't have to do a lot of pressing and so when you make your stack just keep them really organized and then they're ready to go I only use the Accu quilt to cut up to six and a half inches everything above that I cut myself so just a tip for you and I also as you can see made my ironing pad this is actually an MDF board it's a two foot by four foot MDF board from Home Depot or Lowe's and you cover it with one or two layers of batting of warm and natural and then I just cover it with a piece of fabric and duct-tape it on and recently I just recovered this so you just cover it just like you would a mat the only reason I have an extra piece on here is because it's white I have a cat and she likes to sit on there and so sometimes cats can get things dirty this way I can take that top off and wash it so let me show you how I actually do this I have a box the decorator box and most of my dies fit in here they're all organized by size I put my extra mats in here so they slip in the back and any instructions directions all the goodies that come with it fit in there too the only one that doesn't fit in there are these square ones the bigger ones and the six and a half inch die and then the long two and a half inch strip cutter the rest of them fit in there so what I do is I take my scraps and literally I did the same thing on here you'll see I mark the corners so that I know exactly beyond so what I do is I take scraps just like this and I set them on there so I'll have all of these dies laid out on a table and when I lay them out in a table by size I just start taking my scraps and I lay them out exactly where they go now if I had a bigger piece and I was cutting two inch squares that's fine these were actually cut for three inches and when I went to sew them together last night I see that the selvage is here remember my girlfriend cuts them for me and she doesn't really pay attention to selvages and also the accuracy isn't always there so you have to adjust for that so make sure that you're covering your whole piece so there's six here six here I've got six in here I believe and then I've got a couple more I have to put in I think there was only five on there so you just set in there and you'll see that you can see all four corners then what you do is you take put that I just take your mat set it in here I always do it wrong the first time go the wrong way and I crank it through I know the electric ones are really nice but that was just way too much to invest in for a scraps because that's all I use it for then you take these off and you can see that everything's there if they don't cut just have a pair of snips handy because we've used these so much sometimes the fabrics get buried down in there this goes into that scrap bag that you saw that container and the other thing that will help to have around is a pair of tweezers that you can come in here and clean those out and just clean your snips out your little schnibbles if you slide the mat off these come off easier I'm going to try and do that okay so now these are ready to go into my pile and to make quilts and so this would be used this is what I did for the scrappy squares one two three and four now this one there's three of them on here but you can see I'm just this is a leftover so I'm just gonna cut it off set that on there run it through after you get the first one you'll see you don't know which direction I just don't use it as often my girlfriend uses it more and so you will see that you have cut your pieces they're ready for your size that you want so I hope that this helps you with how I use and use it for scraps all the way up I do recommend here's another one the girls with embroidery machines and do a lot of applique this is wonderful but I did not buy this for years because I'm not I don't have time to applique don't have time to applique as you can see when you slide it off it's much easier and your dyes will wear out so that two-and-a-half inch one I probably need to buy a new one and so it is there we go so they are ready to go into a quilt and I just I love doing it you will see that I also have a square usually handy so that I can kind of measure my scraps as I go the other thing I do is I typically lay all of my I think I said that ty typically lay all my dies down and then I just take scraps and I start laying them on to wherever I want them if you're making a quilt that changes everything and I am really excited because I have I'm back to doing English paper piecing again and I went to Houston two weeks ago for the International Quilt Festival and one of the things that I looked at it the Accu quilt booth was this dye and I was like well that's great but I only you know I do the one inch size but I don't have any I do papers I do papers inside I know there's a oh my gosh I saw so many different options of what to do with the how to do English paper piecing it was fascinating but I don't do one and a half inch sides and I don't do not yet two and a half inch sides but what I discovered was after I got home that this would work because Who am I gonna find this I'm working on a project right now sorry this is Wiggly it's actually wrapped around my neck my camera but I'm excited because I do 3/4 of an inch around and so this would be a perfect size I had to use a ruler to do mine but this would work for the 2 inch or two and a half this will work for the another size that I do it would work for the 1 inch also instead of one and a half and it just brings in more fabric I don't care because sometimes these shift and I like having that extra on there because I I'm in don't I'm not perfect on so anyway but that's how I do it and this is for a new pattern so you can be watching for that one of these days so I'm excited to get this and I decided that I could do is it for my own sizes but they come packaged like that so they have directions they show you what to do and keep track you might want to make a list on your phone of the dyes that you have because when you see them it shows and they're on sale and you want to buy one you can't remember what you've got so keep a list of that and also I love this on you know I bought this by mistake I have two of them and I was going to you know return it somewhere or sell it or something I went wait a minute these do wear outs so keep that in mind you don't want to get rid of them they will help you you'll use it eventually so I hope this helps you to create many beautiful quilts and just have a blessed day take care bye

Channel: JodysJemsQuilting

Views: 9,736

Rating: 4.878788 out of 5

Keywords: Accuquilt, Quilting, Quilts, Scrap Fabrics, Scrappy, DIY Ironing Board, Fabric cutting

Id: 4wFzzzgklnM

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019