Chain Reaction Quilt Patterns | National Quilter's Circle

chain-reaction is a quilt that designed by lee heinrich it appeared in quilt makers march april 2012 issue you can see it's an off-center X block and it creates a really fun vertical design as as you run down through with the chain effect and the different size diamonds that are created because of the off-center X after looking at Lee's quilt we sent that off to quilt maker scrap squad which is a group of women who create a pattern after it's gone to the printer before it's seen in print so that when the issue comes out we can see a huge variety of what people have how people have interpreted that pattern and I want to show you a couple quilts made from some of the scrap squad members for chain reaction first is Bonnie Stapleton and she has a teal background with pumpkin colored chains running through her quilt Melissa Radke really played with the color design in hers with stripe with the strips going from yellow to orange to red back to orange back to yellow in a diagonal setting so she really played paid close attention to her color arrangement as she was designing hers and Donna Hanley has a white and black chain running through each of the vertical rows and then she alternates black and red in the opposite in the alternating rows so you can see there's a huge variety of things that you can do with this chain reaction quilt so after seeing Lee's quilt and after seeing what the scrap squad was doing this is one that I really wanted to play with now in the original pattern the strips are all two and a half inches and that made me start looking at pre cuts and so here you can see I've got some Tonka treats from timeless treasures and the two and a half inch strips come in a huge variety of colors and obviously there's a whole bunch more out there and you can also do the same thing just with cutting up your own scraps so as I looked at the two and a half inch precuts I also wanted to look at the ten inch square pre cuts so this packet has all 10 inch squares and I wanted to use those for the background but in the original pattern you start with a smaller about an 8 by 6 inch rectangle after you add the strips you end up with an 8 inch block but I didn't want to take a pre-cut a ten inch and trim it down smaller so I calculated new dimensions and that's what I'm going to show you today is how to make chain reaction with the new sizes already for pre cuts so let me show you what some jump ahead and show you the finished blocks to show you the effect I was going for and you'll see with the off-center X in this case I've got a medium strip that's running through and creating a medium chain and then I've got the dark one running through here and so about half of my blocks in this case 20 are going to have dark on the bottom and the other half are going to have mediums on the bottom so as we as we begin to make this we're going to have to first divide our strips into mediums and darks in order to get started so for my version of chain reaction I'm using the pre cuts and the first thing I thought after I selected these is maybe I could do divide them in two blues and greens but there weren't enough it didn't divide out equally so then I wanted to look at them by value so after opening it up and dividing them into into lights or mediums and darks the yellows it was easy to see the two lighter yellows from the two darker yellows and here I was a little trickier so I divided them out what I thought was the darker ones and what I thought were the lighter ones and then what I did was take a picture and converted the picture to greyscale so that I could see where I needed to make some changes when you take the color out it sometimes is easier to see that value difference and so then by rearranging some of these some of these are actually lighter and some of these that are actually darker and it can be tricky especially with boutiques because you have such a variety of color happening on them but by devote by looking at it in grayscale you can see where it's mostly dark mostly more medium and mostly more dark and then I can take another picture convert it to grayscale and see that I actually have a much better division now between my mediums and my and I'm not 100% convinced yet that my dark yellows and my medium yellows are going to play into this but I'm keeping them in the mix for now because I want to see what happens when I start using them so now that the advantage of having the pre cuts is that they are pre-cut and so preparing them for for the actual use in the block becomes a whole lot easier because you have much less cutting to do and let me show you how I cut these further for my new sizes from the original pattern I want to cut cut these strips into thirds because this block is made with more trimming I don't have to have real precise sizing as I make these cuts so I'm keeping the folded edge at one side and I'm just kind of lining them on my on my mat using the lines on the map so this is it about half an inch further away and checking it at this end and again making sure that the folds are all on one side if you are doing something where you needed precise 2 inch squares you'd have to be a little more careful than I'm being but I know that these strips are approximately 40 inches long you'll notice that in reality if you come down here and take a look in reality they're all slightly different so but because of the trimming that we're doing as we make the blocks I'm not worried about trimming my cell we just first and I'm not as concerned about the exact size on these I want them to be about 14 inches and so because I have the fold here I can cut them 7 inches long and when these are opened up now I have my 14-inch cut and I have three more two more that are also about 14 inch so now I can divide all of these mediums into one pile and I have all of my mediums pre-cut ready to use and I will do the same thing with the darks and I did will do the same thing with the yellows and kind of mix them in as well so that's how you get your strips ready is cutting them dividing them into your two color groups and then cutting them into 14-inch approximately 14 inch strips next we're going to prepare the background squares so they're pre-cut into 10 inch squares and we need to cut a line that's at a 30-degree angle let me show you first kind of a reminder about some high school geometry when you have a 30-degree angle the opposite angle is going to be 60 degrees and sometimes it's helpful to know that so you can get an alignment for the right way that for the direction that you want to cut if you are right-handed you can align this 60-degree line on your ruler right along the edge of your fabric and you would cut right there and you've got a 30 degree line if you are left-handed you would want to align the 30 degree line on your ruler on the edge and cut on this side the difference this time though is that we're not cutting to the edge of the fabric at this point we want to be one and a half inches away and on paper right now this is just a pretend one and a half inches so now I want to align the 60 degree line still stays at the top of the fabric and now it's one and a half inches away and I'm going to cut on this side if I'm right-handed if I'm left-handed I'm aligning at the edge of the fabric one and a half inches away and I'm going to cut on this side so let me show you my my version which is right-handed because the it's hard to align a piece of fabric on a half-inch and know for sure where it is I used some painters tape and just line that up at the top and the bottom at the 1/2 inch mark so that I've got to have good half-inch so now I can come over to one and a half inches and I'm going to align the top edge of the ruler on the 60 degree line one and a half inches away from the edge of the corner and that's the first cut to prepare the background squares the good thing is if you align your pre-cut school your 10 inch pre-cuts you can line several up at one time in this case I've got four here you can align those up next to your painters tape your 60 degree line one and a half inches away and that's where you want to be real fussy and make sure you exactly one and a half inches away and that your along the top edge and do your cut and and very quickly you can have all of your background squares cut and ready to go with all of your pre-cut strips and then we're ready to start sewing okay now we're gonna get ourselves organized and actually sew some blocks so for the first block with dark strips sewn in first for the along the bottom of the X I want 20 backgrounds that are all pre-cut and I want 20 dark strips and I want 20 medium strips and I'm going to start with sewing a dark strip to the segment of the background that is cut at the closest the 1 and 1/2 inches if you notice over here this is longer than the 1 and 1/2 that we cut so these I'm going to set aside I'll come back to them in a little bit I'm going to pick up a dark strip and my first background strip now if you remember when we trimmed when we trimmed these strips we left selvage on there so there's selvage at this end so when I'm putting it sewing these on I want to make sure I get plenty up here because I'm going to be trimmed this is where I'm going to be trimming so I put these two pieces together sew a quarter inch seam along this edge and then it will be ready to trim so you're going to line and I would go through and so all of my strips took 20 my dark strips to the 20 background strips and then I would bring all of them over to cut but I'm just going to show you one so you're going to line the background up and you're going to cut off that edge of the block and you're going to do the same with that edge of the block then you're going to pick up your corresponding background piece and I'm actually going to flip to this one so now you have your trimmed dark strip to your to your background you're going to pick up the background piece that matches see this one's longer than the one in the half-inch and now you need to offset this by a quarter inch and let me show you how to do that and give you some hints for how to practice that if that's new to you the edge that you want to start at and I'm going to go ahead and mark this so you can see what's going on if you mark a quarter inch on your seam this is where you would be sewing you want this quarter inch to be lined up exactly like that so when your needle comes in when you put this into your sewing machine your needle is going to be right there and it's going to nestle right into that spot you're going to sew this and then when you get to the other end it's going to be the exact same thing a quarter inch in here if you're off if you're sewing like this you're going to have too wide of an area here and it's not going to line if you if you're off this direction it's also not going to line when you get that perfect quarter inch offset exactly like that when it's sewn after you press it and open it up it's going to align perfectly across that strip so that's how you do the offset quarter inch offset seem to get that background piece in place and you can mark you can mark this edge for as long as you need to until you're comfortable with it but really what's key is is Figg is is learning where that spot is so that when you put it into your sewing machine your needle schools right into that where the two fabrics match and so then you're going to sew all that so now you can have a pile of squares like this that are all sewn together like that and we're going to do another cut at 30 degrees and again you want to be careful show you this is this is how is oriented the first time we cut if you remember one and a half inches in on this side we want to do the same thing we want to do it from this side we want one and a half inches from here and we want the 30 degree line going this way so in this case I'm going to turn the block over align it to my painters tape make sure that I notice that it's one and a half inches on this side so I want one and a half inches right there pick up my ruler align the 60 degree line on the ruler one and a half inches away from the edge of the fabric and I'm going to cut now this one I would do these one at a time I wouldn't try to stack these because you this this wants to be pretty precise leaving this one against the edge move the largest segment to the side and you're going to cut one and a half inches away from this edge and that's how you're going to insert the strip and yes I'm going to turn the ruler the mat so that I can make that slice and you're just going to set this segment you trimmed away off to the side so now you've got your your two halves ready to insert your next your medium strip and again if you've done all 20 of these you keep them lined up so that so that your strips and backgrounds are all in the same order and again I'm going to pick up the one that has the one and a half inch on this end with a medium strip you with the medium strip and again if I have selvage I want make sure it's out of the way I'm going to line it up here and I'm going to sew sew that down and after I press it it's time to trim again so I align that edge trim off that lift this over trim this one off and I have a trimmed block that's now ready for its second side so I bring this side back over and again I'm going to offset by a quarter inch I'm going to do it okay so quarter-inch there the needle will nestle in there I'll show my quarter-inch seam and after I saw that quarter inch seam press it open and the block is finished so the first first batch of these will be 20 with the darker fabric so none first and the lighter fabric sewn in second then I'm going to do the same thing all over again with 17 backgrounds and at this time I'm going to put the medium strip in first followed by the darker strip now one other thing when when I did the first batch I pressed everything to the center so all of the seams were pressed to towards the strip went for the 20 blocks with the dark fabric inserted first when I did the second batch of 17 with the medium strip sewn in first I pressed those with with the seam going away from the strip and then that way when I put these blocks together they'll be able be able to nest together they'll nest together well and so that's how you're going to get all 20 20 blocks with the dark strips first and 17 blocks with the medium strip sewn in first now let me show you a couple pitfalls because we all know what happens let me show you first if you if you don't get your seam offset by a quarter inch this is where it's it's going to mess up in this case the points were aligned instead of being offset and you can see clearly now that this block is now not the same size because you're going to have to be trimming off here and here when you first pick up the strip of fabric to sew to a background segment you want to make sure that your thought you've got the the shorter portion of the fabric near the this this edge if you and what you want to do you'll do this once and check it to make sure if you get these sown in wrong when you try to align this up you don't have enough strip you don't have enough of this strip to go all the way across so you want to make sure that you get everything sewn at the top edge the third pitfall when you are making your second cut you've got one and a half inches here if you don't get the one and a half inches over here you can see you don't get an off-center block and so I wanted to show you these pitfalls because there are things that we run into a couple these I had to make to show you the mistake this one I made it all by myself without intending to make this one wrong so there you have 20 blocks and 17 blocks prepared and ready for layout and final design decisions so now I've broke the blocks to a design wall and if you remember 20 of the blocks have a dark strip in the background I put a pin in the top corner of those so that I can keep keep them straight as I'm rearranging them and you'll notice the dark strip block is always with the larger portion at the top the lighter strip block always has a smaller portion at the top so here I've just put them up randomly and you'll see the the rows are staggered so that means the second and fourth row once you know for sure where the blocks are going to land then you're going to trim those blocks in half both at the top and at the bottom and the second and fourth rows but I like to put them up on a design wall so that I can see what's there and then and then step back and start making some decisions about it one of the things I noticed because I was just putting them up randomly I've got two backgrounds here that are the same so I'm going to trade these two and just see what happens with that and I like that better but then you know what here I ended up with two next to each other on my darks and that may be okay but maybe I want to change that out so welcome down to this one and rearrange here again now one thing that's key when you're doing this is take lots of photos as soon as you get something that you think you like take a photo so you can record it before you make more chain and now you can follow and see okay we've got the dark strip running down through we've got the light strip running through and again take a step back and see is there an area that's too dark or an area that's too light one thing that I'm noticing is that this really light yellow against the pale background really tends to disappear and I don't like that so I'm going to take that block away and bring in a new block because I made a few extras and then I can start to look at that and see okay is that all kind of working for me and and it's it's okay I've got another spot over here with the two darks next to each other so this one doesn't have a pin so I'll grab nope I'm not gonna grab that one cuz that puts the lights together we'll put this one down there and put that one there and I can spend a lot of time arranging and rearranging and playing with the blocks sometimes I'll put them on the wall like this and let it sit for a while come back into the room another time and see if they see what it looks like after I've let it look looked at it for a while one thing I'm starting to notice you would you would want to make sure in this case by putting them up randomly the yellows did get distributed pretty well and you have to look at and decide I'd like those yellows to I want to keep them in another thing now that I'm noticing is that I do have a lot of the orange backgrounds I'm starting to wonder what happens if I put all the orange backgrounds together and kind of stop paying attention to the darks and and and mediums and the crosses and just kind of play with the background so that the oranges are together and kind of moving out from from orange out dark to light backgrounds so I'm going to start moving some orange backgrounds around and kind of bring them over here to one side now I kind of have that orange is happening I've got some darker blues around them I could bring some more blue up a little closer and again just kind of step back take a look and see what do you think at this point there's no right or wrong it's what you like and so you might like them all scattered around randomly you might like this background kind of centering in on the orange and then and then dispersing out to other colors so this is this has just been a really fun way to play with these blocks I really enjoy this part of it when I get to this stage when the blocks are made and just kind of playing with it to see what it turns into let me go back and show you another scrap squad quilt at this point this one was designed by Jackie Hughes and if you remember all those pieces that we trimmed off from the center of our blocks she took hers and incorporated them in her bolt into her border and it was a really fun way to use all these trimmings you also could sew them together to create a strip panel strip for your backing at this point now I'll take these blocks off the design wall and after knowing for sure what what arrangement I want on my colors I'll make that final decision then I'll take them to the sewing machine to sew them together one more thing I want to point out to you is as you sew them together make sure that you are aligning the strips next to each other more closely than the edges once you have your vertical rows sewn together if you're off a little bit on the edges that's when you want to do a final trim on your edges but so pay attention to where the strip's are joining as you as you sew the rows together and here you'll see what my final chain reaction is it's a real fun easy block has a couple fussy moments but I showed you how to take care of those and I hope you enjoy your chain reaction as much as I've had fun with mine

Channel: National Quilters Circle

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Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class

Id: 1mvIHdgmP8U

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 19 2014