Deb and the Disappearing Nine Patch - Tips & Tricks from the Tucker Team

hi everybody deb tucker here for another thursday tips and tricks have you ever had this happen to you you need a gift in a hurry well it happened to me just a couple weeks ago and i thought i would share with you the project that i decided to make and when i was going about deciding what i wanted to make for this special couple that's getting married here in just a week or so um i thought i've never made a disappearing nine pack or a disappearing four patch and i've seen a lot about them and i thought that would be a perfect time to give it a try so i went searching online saw this project and thought yes this is it this will make a perfect project and then i started watching the directions and i realized that i was coming up against something that i know would be a problem for me when i was doing my piecing they were having me build these um half square triangle units with ten inch squares and we all have lots of those ten inch squares but they were having me put those ten inch squares together stitch around those outside edges and then cut on both diagonals that would yes indeed give me pieced squares but i know and you know if you watch my video last week that those piece squares would have four bias edges all the outside edges would be a bias and i know from experience that ends up being a problem in the works so what i've decided to do was make this quilt and i'm going to call mine hocus pocus because it really is pretty amazing how it happens um and how the block is built but i'm going to share with you my directions to create these so that all of your edges are on the straight of the grain giving you good quality blocks as well as the quick construction all right so instead of the 10 inch squares let's begin this process we're going to begin with eight and a half inch squares and you're going to need for each block two colored squares that are eight and a half inches and two background squares that are eight and a half inches and all those four squares will create one finished block and then we're going to follow this process we're going to mark position stitch cut and then press and then we'll go on to the next step but what do i mean by that this is what i need to be able to create these i usually work on with my lightest square and when i mark what i'm talking about are marking stitching lines that are a quarter of an inch off the center diagonal now you can mark the center diagonal if you want i usually mark the actual stitching lines by using my quilter's magic wand on there and putting the two stitching lines right on the fabrics now once i have that marked i'm going to line up and position both those squares so that all the edges are even i'm going to stitch on the lines that i've marked i'm going to cut right down the middle between them and then you'll see immediately that i've got those half square triangles and i'm going to give them a press now i happen to press them open but if you'd like you can press them toward the dark it doesn't really matter on this one but what you're going to notice or you should notice is that that piece is on the straight of the grain that means it's going to build quality project instead of just a real quick and down and dirty project so the squares that i create are actually going to be just a little bit larger than eight inches by eight inches to me that's not a problem because that allows me to clean these up and create them to and make them a very accurate size to before i go on to the next steps and when i go to trim these down the tool of choice for me is my tucker trimmer three this is a tool that if you don't know it it's loaded with diagonal guidelines so that when you know that you're trimming something to eight inches all you need to do is put the eight inch diagonal along the seam and trim two edges rotate the unit underneath trim the next two edges and i'm going to have a perfectly sized square to go on to build the rest of the quilt and not very much waste in the process so i'm going to trim all four of the squares to eight inches by eight inches and then i'm going to stitch the four squares together into a very big block and this right now is going to be 15 and a half inches by 15 and a half inches i'm going to place two background triangles kind of nose to nose and two of the color triangles nose to those i again like to press those seams open but it really is up to you how you press them but after i've got them stitched and pressed the next step is to sub cut that square into nine different units or nine different patches and i'm going to do that by making cuts at two and a half inches measured from the center seam so i've got a center seam here and i've got a center seam here i'm going to make cuts on either side i'm going to measure over two and a half inches and make a cut on this side i'm going to measure over two and a half inches and make a cut on this side same thing from the horizontal seam measure up two and a half inches to make a cut measure down two and a half inches to make a cut and once you've cut those horizontal and vertical lines what's going to happen is you are going to then have nine different units that will go on to create this particular block and here's where the magic happens because it's just a rotation what i do to create this block is rotate these units and i'm going to start with the north and south units and i'm going to rotate them 180 degrees so what's on the outside you're going to go to the inside what's on the outside i'm going to go to the inside i could sew those together but that's not what i was shooting for i'm then going to take and focus on the corner pieces those are also going to get rotated the triangles started in the center and i'm going to rotate those so that the triangles are now on the outsides oh we're getting closer and the last thing that i did here let me orient this so that you can see the darks in the same corners i could sew this together but i chose to take that center piece and give it a quarter turn rotation to create this block from those nine shapes wow no there's no saying that you can't stitch this together if you like it better it would make an equally fine project but one of the reasons i call this hocus pocus is because this is just the tip of the iceberg not only can i make those two variations with these same pieces but watch what happens if i come back and rotate those north south east and what i'm sorry yes the north south east and west units back to there i've got yet a different block it's pretty amazing i actually got to playing and i ended up with a bunch of different blocks i'm going to go off camera here i'm going to bring them in so you can see these are just some of the variations that you can get into with those nine basic building blocks that you created when you did this but the nice thing is every single one of these blocks every single shape has straight of grain on all the edges so you are building good sound solid project with your hocus pocus quilts so i um you're going to be able to see uh we have a link here on the video that you will be able to see these in grayscale um and here's a challenge how many of you can need a quick quilt go ahead and make these up take the one block and make it up into a whole quilt and see what it looks like and if you're loving these fabrics i couldn't resist using these this is a collection of fabric that's going to soon be showing up in your local quilt shops this is my williams garden signature collection with island batik i've had more fun with this grouping of fabrics and i'm good i can see i'm going to have to start cutting up this bundle to make some more of these blocks and you should know that if you use fat quarters each fat quarter will give you a total of four blocks plus a little bit of extra but four eight and a half inch squares that will go on to create two different blocks for a project so one big bundle of these will get you a nice big project when you're all said and done so i hope you've enjoyed this thursday tips and tricks come back next week and join us and please you get some of these made up send me some photos i can't wait to see what you come up with take care everybody see you next week

Channel: Deb Tucker's Studio 180 Design

Views: 22,759

Rating: 4.9626169 out of 5

Keywords: Studio 180 Design, Deb Tucker, Studio 180

Id: P6lD_4zuLDI

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020