How to have Fun with Five Inch Squares - Let's do the Splits! - Quilting Tips & Techniques 051

hello today I'd like to show you how to have a little bit of fun with some five inch squares and if you've been watching some of my videos you might have got the hang of the fact that I quite like five inch squares by now and I also quite like bright colors but we're going to have a little bit of fun today with a little block that I've made and I've called it splits and because it's just split between two five inch squares it ends up a little bit smaller than five inches but I'll show you what I've done and so I'm actually just using a plain white so I've got quite a few white squares and then some colors and so I've cut quite a lot of the white and some colors and I've layered them in a pile here now I'm using my board to help me line things up and I've just led a white square and these fabrics are all right side up now the white probably doesn't really matter which way it goes but we'll be using it the Wrights top side is the right side then I've layered one of the squares on top then I've added another white and another colored square on top that's because we went because we're alternating when can layer them that way and cut them and then they're ready to sew together as well so if you line them up with the lines on the board so they're sitting comfortably we're going to cut it now this is it on an angle this is obviously not just a straight half and so I'm good to line it because I'm lining it up on my board I can use the markings on my board so this is five inches across the square so going to line the ruler up so that it starts at the two inch mark coming from my left and it's going to go at an angle to the opposite two inch from the right from my right and and I'm going to cut through all four layers together now if you're going to make a quilt using these blocks you will always end up with them the same if you cut them all the same so that's why I've said if you keep them the right side up they will end up all the same if you have some going up the other way you will end up with reverse which may not be helpful for what you're trying to do we're really just going to have a little play I'm going to show you how you can play so I'm just cutting that along that line so that was two inches along from one end and two inches along from the other end and now so that I can sew them together I'm going to take the top one on the left and put it to the bottom and now I'm ready to sew a color tor white all the way through that pile so I just take them to the sewing machine we're going to use a regular quarter inch seam and I'm just going to line this up now because it's cus on an angle there's a funny little bit of each end but you'll find that that little point will extend at about the quarter inch mark where we're going to be sewing so just line them up as best you can we will be trimming down so it's not absolutely critical at this stage so just with your quarter inch seam now so it does look a little strange can you see it sitting at a funny angle but that's okay so you could get quite a few of these Pat if you wanted to and make them stick because now I'm going to pick up the next pair so the next pair is just sitting there waiting for me so I'm going to flip the right side over that we're sewing the right sides together and that's all ready for me to sew now and I so I can train piece these we can have several ready and just keep going so back to my pile the next ones ready I can just flip that over put it right sides together with the white and it's ready to say what it will be when I've lined it up and just the last one now for my little stick here I would probably if I was making a call I would probably get quite a few ready in a stick because I quite like the train piecing I can just get going on it so that's all I'll do just at the moment now I'm going to snip those apart yeah I'm going to quickly eye them ironing is always a good thing it always helps things sit nicely so now because I'm using white I'm going to lay my white fabric down first and I'm going to hold the iron so I've got the right side up and I'm just going to let that press that over so that seam is going towards the color so it doesn't show through the white so we started with some five inch squares there now not going to be square anymore because we've taken a slice right from the middle but we're going to trim them back to being square but they will be a bit smaller overall not a lot of wastage so as you can see I'm going to end up with something like that and currently it's it's way too long and a little bit too wide so I'm going to lay it again I like to use my board to line things up and mine is sitting at about a quarter we're going to be trimming it down to four inches so mine is sitting at about a quarter of an inch either side of that four inch line so you want to balance it so that so that you're angled seam still sits pretty much in the middle of your block so I've got approximately quarter inch and they may not be exact fabric has a little habit of its own things are not always exact but I do want it to be four inches so I'm going to trim off about quarter of an inch on either side of that block so again lining up with the board I find the markings on the board really helpful because it's kind of just all sitting there and another quarter inch off the other side so now my block is four inches wide and it's still five inches long now you could use it like that is elect angular block that would be fine but I want mine to be square today so I'm going to lay that again I've lined it up with the lines on the board and I'm approximately half an inch either side got that four inch line and I'm going to trim on that line and I do all the squares the same way so that they all ending up fairly similar so whilst we've got a little bit of a funny angle we're ending up with a similar look so I'm just going to do one more just to go through that again so line up it should be five inches long so it should sit on those lines it's going to be approximately a quarter of an inch beyond the four inch line each time so I'm just going to trim that off to make it four inches wide I'm going to turn it round and it's now going to sit a half an inch either side of the four inch line approximately and be 4 inches that way so just trim these little bits off and I've ended up with a nice four inch square block and now I'm just going to show you that there's lots of things you can do you can have a real fun time playing with these blocks so I've made a few already so that I can show you that and I'll just give you a little bit of an idea I had a little play on my software program on the computer and I've done a few suggested possible layouts and they could be a whole lot more exciting with fabric of course than what I've done here but it was just to give you a bit of an idea of some different things that we're going to do so this first one that I've got at the top here I've just got some of my blocks laid out more or less in that angle so they would end up this strip so what I've used in the way of colors is I kind of wanted one color but not just one color so I've got blue and green which are almost one color and and if you have a little splashes of color on it but basically it's kind of that blue and green with the white which I'm hoping when I make it up into a foot will end up if I did this layer so I'd end up basically with with these stripes with this little jagged edge coming along which I thought was quite fun now to do this option number two that I've put up here and all you have to do it's actually turn around every second block so that you end up with a wider jagged sort of stripe I suppose you'd call it now you could do these going horizontally or you could do them going vertically and if this sort of design appeal to you I think it's a lot of fun and you could use it in multicolor of course you'd have a slightly different look I was wanting something that almost blended but not completely so there you can see that you can get that sort of stripe and again you've got this sort of jagged thing happening here when they're all joined up that would just be slightly smaller I guess and another option I might show you quickly would be perhaps this sort of pin wheel lock which can be quite fun to do oh and for that one we just need to turn the blocks around again so basically to make one of the pin wheels you just need four of these little blocks so I'll turn some of these around so you can see how the pinwheels appear so let's just that way so I have this have a narrower end in towards the middle if your colored strips so that it kind of goes out a bit like a blade and you would put them all together like that throughout your quilt if that was the design that you were wanting so what I'm trying to show you here is that there's a lot of fun to be had just playing you may have a design wall at home the design wall is great fun it might have a sort of a flair or cotton brushed surface and the fabrics will just stick to it I have got one but it's not in the right place to show you and so you can see there's lots of possibilities and should I just do one more possibility I might show you this the exact possibility if I can get that one right while you're watching so we're going to go that way that way that way so that one must which way does that one that way yes oh we get this one on that one I'll get this one going down and then we'll be able to see better what we're doing it's the next one and one's going wrong there so can you start to see this zigzag that's forming here and we've got this last little one coming down here goes there so there you can see that you're getting this fun zig zaggy woogie wonky zig zaggy shape coming down through there so that was um just a little idea that I had to cut a five inch square in half and place it with another color and I've called it splits and as you can see there are so many possibilities and so after this I really just wanted to encourage you to have a level play to try out different colors maybe get a pencil on paper and draw up some ideas or if you've got some software on your computer of course that's another way of doing things and but it was really just an encouragement just to show you how much fun you can have just playing with five inch squares you don't need a lot of fabric you don't need even a lot of colors necessarily and but it is just fun thank you very much

Channel: GourmetQuilter

Views: 260,665

Rating: 4.8922772 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilting, patchwork, fabric, five inch, squares, sewing, craft, cutting, how to

Id: xQiCWruw4-g

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2013