How to Cut Patchwork Squares

hey everyone its Melanie ham welcome back to my channel today I'm going to be sharing with you how to cut patchwork squares now in order to cut your Patrick squares there's a few things that you need you need your rotary blade make sure that you have a fresh blade on here not every time that you're going to do a session of cutting but if you start to have to really press down or it's not getting a clean cut then that's the time you know you need to change out your blade so you've got your blade you also need a self-healing mat this is my 18 by 24 which is a great size that I also liked a bigger size you need a 6 by 24 inch ruler this is the first ruler that I recommend for beginning cultures so this is something every quilter or anyone cutting patchwork should have in their repertoire and you can use this for all of our patchwork cutting if you need it but then I'm also going to be sub cutting down with a smaller ruler so I'm going to show you how to do that it just makes it a little bit more manageable you don't have a giant thing like slinging all over the place you can easily sub cut this with your smaller ruler I really like these Olfa frosted rulers they have a non-stick coating on the back which makes it really handy to cut with so I've really been enjoying cutting with these rulers and if you are looking for any of my specific products that I'm using everything is linked in the description box below ok so I'm going to use this piece of fabric just a little bit smaller sort of for demonstration purposes and you can use these techniques with any sort of cutting that you need to do so we can pretend like this entire thing is 1 yard of fabric so usually when you buy fabric it comes off the bolt so it's folded in half so you've got your fold down here and your selvage edges up here at the top so that would be if you're going to be cutting yardage but if you're cutting fat quarters like this or other scraps this all of these things are going to be the exact same so the first thing that I do is make sure my fabric is laying nice and straight and we need to cut this first edge and the reason we need to cut this first edge is because we really need to make sure we have an angled edge 90 degree angle that we can trust and I like to put it that way because we don't know where these have been cut if we've cut them before if they were cut at the shop or you just never know so we want to make sure that we know for sure that that cut is straight the most important thing is down here so we're going to line it up and we want the line to go all the way across that way we know it's a 90 degree angle but not just a 90 degree angle here all the way across so if it was like that it's line up right here but then it starts to get wonky down here so we really want to make sure 90 degrees all the way across once we know that for sure I kind of like to hold my ruler like with my hand fanned out a little bit so that then I can cut I am right-handed so if you're not right-handed if you're left-handed you would reverse this keep that nice and firm and straight now we know this cut is good now another thing is at this point I will flip my fabric so I'll flip it to this side keeping everything nice and straight keeping everything nice and straight and the reason why I do that is because I want to always use my ruler for my measurements and not my mat if I can avoid it there are times where I need to use my mat and that's totally fine we're going to be making six inch strips and that's the entire width of this ruler but I want to show you really quick a tip if you're going to be doing something less so if you're doing a strip that's less than the width of your ruler let's say four inches so when you are lining up your ruler lines on your fabric this doesn't matter in any situation this is what you want to do you can see here how the black line is on my fabric so when we line it up we want the line on the fabric we don't want it off and hovering above the mat over time your your strip is actually going to be too small and then over time you have a discrepancy in your sizing so you want to make sure to include them so when I say include the line that's what I mean so now we want to make sure that this line and this line are correct before we make our cut okay so that was for the four inch and then we're also going to do a six inch as an example so six inch would be the same kind of thing but we'll just line it up with the side all right so now when you are cutting your patchwork squares no matter what size they are and you have your strip you can open the strip up now the best way to cut our strips is to sub cut them down but we can do two or maybe even three or four strips at one time which is the super handy trick that I wanted to teach you guys all right so I've got another strip already prepped and we can stack them right on top of each other now you'll see me a lot of times using my fingers my fingernails the kind of position everything it's just sort of a handy thing if you have nails that makes it kind of nice so we know that we have already cut the top and the bottom cut so we did not cut the sides yet and that's the piece that we need to make sure is correct before we move on to our sub cutting so we'll do it just like we did before we'll line at the top and bottom going all the way across and make sure that we've got a nice consistent line now carefully pick it up and flip it over and now what I like to do is use a smaller ruler you can use the bigger one but I like to use the smaller one just for you know it's a little easier to maneuver around now we're going to be using six inch so we need to include the line this way and this way I really like these because they don't slip not as much as like the standard acrylic rulers the smaller the pieces it's a little easier to manage because you can get your whole hand on top of there so just do your best and if you have to really push too hard then do less amount of strips ok so we're going to cut it and then don't move anything you'll move the pieces that we cut we'll move those aside and then leave this part of your strip in place and then we'll just move the ruler down that way we don't mess anything up we'll use once you reach the edge of your mat you'll need to move some things that's ok but we're going to just take it as far as we can and so you can see how if you do it this way how quickly you can cut a whole bunch of patchwork squares in no time at all we got all of these squares these are six inch unfinished squares so that means they're going to finish up at five and a half inches once we have our seam allowance in there so quick recap 90 degree angles include your line make sure you've got a fresh blade use the lines on your ruler whenever possible have a nice mat chill out listen to some music make sure that you're you know making sure and you're measuring twice cutting once because it is you know you're cutting it cutting your fabric your precious fabric and some sorts in some cases I hope you enjoyed this patchwork cutting video let me know in the comment section below if you have any questions the description box below the video will have all the products and everything that I mentioned linked down there thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Melanie Ham

Views: 158,189

Keywords: how to, quilting, diy, patchwork, squares, how to cut, cutting, cutting squares, sewing, baby quilt, beginner, easy, tutorial, step by step

Id: YKVp_GLpSLA

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017