How to make a Picket Fence block using 5" squares - Quilting Tips & Techniques 045

hello today I'd like to show you again using some five-minute squares I do like this five inch squares and a block that I have made up using the five inch squares as a starting point and this is a traditional block it's called picket fence and as you can see it's made up of strips that are joined diagonally three strips and the opposite two corners have another a stronger color or a dark color or a different color to the rest of the to the rest of the block and when you put several of these together or four of them together and you turn them around and I'll show you shortly about that they actually form a nice star in the middle but initially I'll just show you how to make the block so starting off with some five inch squares and I've just got half a dozen squares lined up here and I'm going to just trim off one side of those to make it actually five inch by four and a half inch we don't need it to be five by five so just down one side and using my ruler of my board as a guide with my ruler I'm just going to trim off half an inch there and now I'm going to turn that around and again line it up with my board so it's nice and straight and I'm going to cut those in half so I'm going to cut up two and a half inches so I'll end up with rectangles that are two and a half inches by four and a half inches and then in order to make this block well we've got the two stronger colors I've got two fabrics here that are stronger and four fabrics here and I need four for the rest of the block so we're going to be joining the this to this and this to this and this to this but we didn't need to join them on a diagonal so it would be much easier if fabrics came with a diagonal mark just where you need one but that doesn't usually happen so we're going to mark our own so on on the lighter ones because it's easier to see on the light color and I'm just going to show you how you can mark a diagonal because what we're going to be doing is sewing if you lay your dark piece down and lay your lighter piece at right angles to it so that the corner matches up there we're going to so from this point down to this point but it's been hard to know exactly where that point is when you're trying to sew it because you can't actually see that fabric underneath so in order to mark that diagonal line on on that larger piece of fabric if you grab a ruler pretty much any ruler has a marking that does the 45-degree angle this one's got one but I actually just going to use the square because it's just easier just at the moment so this line coming through here is at 45 degrees I know it's myths we don't like myths but we're having a little bit of maths today so I'm going to line this 45 degree line up with the edge of my fabric so that then when that sits so I've lined that up along there and I've got the point at the point of the fabric as well and then I can draw the line from there down and I think you'll find that that now is the right position when we lay that one on back on our piece of fabric where we want to sew it together but that starts there and it finishes up right where that point is down there so we need to sew that line there so we need to do three pairs of these and I've actually got three pairs already to sewed so we've got the dark one underneath both times and the other one is just two lights together so this could be all different fabrics but it's quite good if your two opposite corners are a contrast to the rest of them you can make this quote completely scrappy I've just chosen to use pretty much two colors different fabrics but two colors so now at the sewing machine I'm going to sew that diagonal line right on the line that you've drawn we need to do three of these for each block and you can just get them ready like I have been trained please come through you just slip them apart now we need to trim those corners off now if you were really keen on preserving your fabric you could do a second line of sewing half an inch way and then you'd have little tiny half-inch squares but I'm not doing that today I have done it I've done it four borders and things so I'm now going to just trim away quarter of an inch away into that triangle from the scene that we've just sewn this one with all three and then I'm going to press them it's always a good idea to press towards the darker fabric so that seems don't show through the lighter fabrics so just lay down your lighter fabric holding up your dark one and just press it over that seam sit down sitting quite nicely just get all three of those done and with the two lights it doesn't really matter which one you press which way of course and so now I've got my three pieces and I want to join them together to form a block like this so I need to have my darks at opposite ends and I need to be joining that longer side of the dark against the middle and the middle light strip and again the longer side there but going from the other direction so that all these are going that way the darks are opposite but it's this longer side that needs to be against that so you don't want to be joining it like that for example so I'll come back here so that doesn't get fixed in your mind and now we just need to do those two scenes let's make sure that you're keeping everything in the right position can we'll give it a quick press again holding your fabrics up let that seam just go to one side for both of those scenes and there you've got your blog now your blog should be measuring six and a half inches which it is in both directions so it's a six and a half inch unfinished blog so finish when it's sewn in with the same lancers gone it will be a six inch block but really it's helpful to do them in lots of four so you could really say this is quarter of a block because you need four of them to form the actual style that we're going to form so if I and you just alternate him and so you're turning one one way and one the other way and if you keep coming round with the four blocks you'll end up with a star in the middle and so then every time you join another lot you're going to as you can see here if I start turning these ones around you're going to end up with another star forming at each intersection so that your corners would just have fatter on the corner of your quilt for instance and you could choose not to have that corner you could just make that two lights specifically in the corner but if you're going to keep on going and make a bit bigger quilt you'll find that these stars keep forming at those intersections of the four so that's a really fun block so when it's if you join the four up to make a block it will actually be a twelve inch it'll measure twelve and a half inch but it'll be a twelve inch block in that state so that might help you so I have done a pattern I'm using the five inch squares in my downloadable patterns and that you can purchase it gourmet quilter calm and I've called it picket fence and this just shows you a picture on the pattern here of what the court might look like and just using will actually random colors but I've used different lights for the background and and some multi colors for the style points so as long as they contrast with your other fabric that looks really good thank you

Channel: GourmetQuilter

Views: 194,471

Rating: 4.9281344 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilting, patchwork, sewing, craft, picket fence block, five inch, squares, how to

Id: F2EnIM_hs6o

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2013