Hello my quilting friends. Leah Day here with a new tip video for the Machine-Quilting Block Party. We have pieced and quilted nine of our blocks for the Sunshine Surprise quilt and we're ready to start putting them together, so in this video we're going to learn how to prepare our blocks, get our binding ready to go, and start connecting them together so our quilt will be nearly finished. Let's get started first working on our blocks. Let's learn how to prep up a block together. The first step is to go on ahead and mark what size it's going to be when you trim it down. I decided on 14½", and that should leave is about ½" all the way around the stitching. Line this up nicely and then use a water-soluble pen to go all the way around the block. Then use that first set of marks and rotate your ruler and give yourself a nice 14½" square. Once you get that marked, take it to your machine. You're going to stitch on that marked line. I'm going to show you what I've done here. I have already stitched along that line and I also stitched ⅛" inside of it. What this did is it flattened out that edge; it stabilized it. If I was just to cut this without any stitching, without any securing, then this fabric would be totally unsecured and very very wobbly. I also have a very puffy batting here and that's going to make it really challenging to put the blocks together accurately. So by adding that extra—I call it a "victory lap", where you go around and then go around inside of that line—it's really going to stabilize it and make it so much easier to go together. That's how I prepped out the block and now it's time to trim it. I'll line the ruler up again with my stitching line with that victory lap, grab a sharp rotary cutter, and trim it up. We're going to work one side at a time, rotate it around, and you want to trim this up nice and accurately to 14½" square. I've prepared all the blocks for the third row of the quilt. I'm working with Block Number 3, Block Number 6, and Block Number 9. I've done the victory lap and I've trimmed all of them down to 14½". You can find the instructions and the binding amounts—what you need to cut for this project—in the Block Number 9 pattern. Let's get started first working only with Block Number 3 and our binding strips. We're going to have 1½" folded binding for the front and 1" binding—not folded, just straight—for the back. You want to make sure before cutting your binding that you pre-wash, starch, and press it. Actually, starch it twice so it's nice and stiff and stable. You don't want the binding to go loosey-Goosey and be wiggly wobbly as you're connecting these pieces together. To get started with the connecting process, we're going to place a 1" piece of back binding and we're going to place it rightside up. We're going to top it with the quilt block rightside up. Notice that we've cut this binding intentionally a little longer than our block. So just in case something shifts and wiggles, we have more than enough binding to cover that edge. We're going to top this with the folded binding so that the raw edges are facing right. Raw edge to raw edge, basically. That's our stack of binding. We're going to take this to the machine and stitch all these layers together with an accurate ¼" seam allowance. I'm using white Aurifll thread, this is 50-weight Meko cotton, and I've lowered my stitch length down to 1.6mm so this is going to stitch together nice and secure. I'm just making sure that all the layers—my back binding, my quilt, and that front binding—all of those raw edges are nice and straight and lined up together along that side. I'm using my ¼" patchwork foot, I'm stitching slowly and carefully. I'm going to stop about every 2" just to double-check. Double-check that everything's in nice alignment as I stitch all the way down. Make sure you finish up as accurately as you started. Just make sure everything's in nice alignment until you stitch all the way off. Again, the binding strips are going to be a little longer than the quilt block, and that's okay. We can always trim that up before we start putting the rows together. The next step is to turn the block over and work on the back binding. We're going to fold this over. If you want to take it to your iron you can press it; I think it's fine to really firmly finger-press this over. I flip it back to the front. I do want to clarify: We're only folding over the back binding. We're not going to mess with this front binding yet. This is ready to go and ready to attach to the next block in our row and that's Block Number 6. I'm going to take that block and flip it over so it's right side down, then top it with Block Number 3 and it's right side up. Now we're going to align that top edge of the block and we're going to align the edge of the back binding with the edge of Block Number 6. Lining all that up. We're going to take this to the machine and stitch this seam through the back binding and through Block Number 6 to connect the blocks together. Again, make sure that the top edges of the blocks are nicely aligned and this edge of the binding is nicely aligned with the edge of Block 6. Slide it underneath the foot and stitch on down. Again, I'm going to stop about every 2" or 3" or so. Just lift up on the block a bit, make sure that those edges are nicely aligned. I do like using my patchwork foot for this; it just fits nicely down into this channel created by the binding and works really easily to connect these blocks together accurately. As we near this bottom edge I also want to make sure that the bottom edge of the blocks are coming together nicely. Again, we're going to have extra binding down here. Don't worry about that, but just look at the edges of the blocks and make sure they're nicely lined up and that this edge of the back binding is still lined up against the edge of that block. So here's what our blocks look like when you've connected them together. Now flip it over to the back. This 1" piece of back binding once you stitch it becomes a little ½" strip. If you've sewn this accurately with a ¼" seam allowance then both of your seam allowances will nest together just exactly right in the middle of that channel. Now if you find that this doesn't work out really well and it feels like there's too much fabric here, just take a pair of scissors and trim it up, and that will help things lay flat and even. To finish that binding we're going to flip over our front binding, this folded edge. Again, give it a good finger-press. You might even want to use one of those finger-pressing tools or just scrape it with your fingernail to get a nice, accurate fold. This is one that I will oftentimes take it to my iron and press it flat. I know we have a little bit of water-soluble marker here where we marked our block but that's all getting covered up by binding, so I feel like it's going to be a-okay to press with your iron if you want to get this super nice and flat. So you press it over and this fold should reach your opposite stitching line. Now you have a lot of options for finishing this. You could finish this with topstitch on your machine and that's just a straight stitch about ⅛" away from that folded edge. You could also finish it by hand with a little appliqué stitch running along that fold and into the corresponding block. That's the way to get an absolutely seamless finish. Just run a line of hand-stitches along it. I'm going to go with the topstitch. I'm just going to stitch a straight line right along this edge about ⅛" inside, and then I'll do the same thing on the opposite side so it looks balanced. Let's go in the machine and I'll show you how to stitch it. I just rolled up my block into the arm of the machine. I'm focusing on this front binding, making sure that it fully encases those seams. Slip it underneath my foot. You could use an edge-stitching foot for this. That would work really well because it would give you a nice accurate placement for your line of stitching. My patchwork foot here has a little shoulder. I like to line up the edge of my binding against that shoulder in the foot. So that works, too. It's just taking that fold. You can see that you have a stitching line from where you attached the binding to this block and you're just folding over so that that fold meets that stitching line. As you stitch it on, if everything has worked out right and it's all nice and flat and your binding hasn't gone loosy-goosey or wobbly-bobbly on you, then this should look just as good on the front as it does on the back. It's a little bit tricky sometimes with different methods. Some methods look great on one side but terrible on the other. Of course, any time that you're stitching from the surface, you don't always have control over what's going on on the back of the quilt. If you're really worried about how it will look then go with the hand-binding option. Stitch this whole folded edge down by hand if you're really worried about how it's going to look on the back of the quilt. So if ever you feel like you can't really get the folded binding to cooperate and it's just not wanting to fold over far enough, put gloves on your hands. You'll get a lot more control over what you're doing, over the fabric and the quilt. Then if you need to use a seam ripper or any kind of stiletto, just poke at it and oftentimes you can poke it into submission and get the layers to cooperate with you. As you near the bottom edge you want to just make sure that that fold stays nice and straight and even with that line of stitching. Once I reach the bottom edge I'm going to rotate and just stitch right along that excess binding on the end. Rotate all the way around again. I'm going to stitch back down along the opposite side. This side doesn't technically have to be secured down but it looks nice when you have both lines of stitching running parallel with one another. It's just kind of an extra additional step but I always think that it looks really good. Of course there are a lot of layers here, which is why my machine is sounding pretty loud as it stitches right down the seam. So this the method we're going to use to connect all of our blocks together: Attach that front and back binding, flip over the back binding, sew it to the next block, and then finish off that edge by doing a little bit of straight topstitching. Here is our first row. This is Block Number 8, Block Number 7, and Block Number 1, and I've already connected them together. Here's our second row. These are Blocks Number 2, 4, and 5. I hope that you'll follow along and connect these blocks together into rows. When it comes to connecting the rows together, the method is exactly the same. The only difference is you're going to be working with longer strips ao you'll want to take a minute to line up your ruler and trim off these little bits of extra binding. Then you're going to do the exact same thing. You're going to add a strip of front and back binding to the bottom edge of Row Number 1. Once you stitch that on you're going to flip over that back binding and stitch it onto the top of Row Number 2. Then you'll fold over that top binding and finish those edges, and that will connect it together super nicely. Now you will want to try and match up these joins and the best way to do that is just by pinning it. If you find that one block might be slightly bigger than the other one, this block to me looks just a little bit big, this isn't lining up quite right, you can kind of stretch the other block and pin and just kind of wiggle the fabric into shape. But even if these joins don't match up just exactly perfectly, your quilt and your blocks are still going to look gorgeous. That's how we are going to connect all of our blocks together. You can see we have this beautiful space here between the blocks if you want to go back over it with a little bit more quilting. That's definitely open to you, too. So that's it for connecting our blocks together. At this point you should be able to connect nine blocks together, that's three rows, and connect those rows together as well. You're really going to be mostly done with your quilt, and then the last few blocks taking us out through the rest of the year. It'll be really easy to finish this up, connect them together, and your Sunshine Surprise Quilt will be done in time for the next quilt-along that we'll be starting in 2017. I really hope that you've enjoyed this video. If you're looking for the pattern and for the binding requirements you can click right here to find them all in the Block Number 9 quilt pattern Until next time, let's go quilt!
