How To Square A Quilt Block

hello I'm Cheryl and welcome to my sewing room in this video I'm going to discuss your finished block size for the beginners sampler quilt I'm sure you're finding out that not all of your blocks are coming out quite the same size remember I told you that the finished block size was twelve and a half for all the blocks but I know in the real world of quilting it doesn't always come out like that so I'm going to address some of those issues on how you can fix those blocks without having to remake all of them I don't want you to do that so let's first talk about what could have gone wrong okay maybe in the very beginning the fabric wasn't cut correctly might have been just a little off all it takes is one piece of fabric cut incorrectly to throw the entire quilt off so you need to always recheck the pieces you cut just to verify that they are the right size then maybe you didn't use the seam allowance maybe you didn't use a quarter inch 1/4 inch throughout the entire quilt maybe one of the seams was that quarter inch but another one might have been slightly bigger the next one a little bit smaller and so forth that will throw the whole block off so you need to be consistent and make all your scenes the same size maybe the tension on your sewing machine was a little tight if you've noticed your fabric is puckering a little bit you might need to loosen up the tension slightly so you look in your users manual for instructions on how to adjust your tension also maybe you didn't press all the time or you over pressed you stretched it out that can throw your block off too pressing is a very key part of making a quilt or maybe you just didn't have the right tools and I'm going to give you an example of what I did when I first started quilting my cutting table was on the inside of a linen closet it was one of those little ironing boards that hung from the back of the door so I would lay that little ironing board down I'm kind of embarrassed even tell this story I had a tiny little cutting mat on it my cutting ruler was a carpenter's ruler not a quilt ruler and my rotary cutter was an old blade and I'm trying to cut my fabric correctly on this ironing board that wasn't a solid flat surface it took me a year and a half to make that quilt that's because I was working and I didn't always have a lot of time and once I got it finished I put it on the bed I didn't literally like it I kept it on the bed overnight and when I got up the next morning I took that quilt off the bed and took it down to the local thrift shop I hated it so much so use the right tools they will make your quilt a lot more successful all right so let's look at your blocks what you want to do is take all of your blocks all right don't trim anything off of them yet just take one of your blocks any one of them lay your square ruler down if you want your blocks to come out well you need a square ruler this is a twelve and a half inch square ruler you will use it so much I highly recommend you get it all you want to do right now you're not going to cut anything off nothing you're just measuring see if the quilt comes out equally on all edges all right if it doesn't then it's off okay it's off but you're not gonna do anything with it just yet right down on a little piece of paper and stick it on your block what size that came out at maybe this one came out twelve and three-eighths not twelve and a half that's fine just leave it to the side take your next block do the same thing measure it check it all out write down the size put a little note on it if it came out the same size as the first block so far you're on a lucky streak set it in that pile if it didn't start a new pile and keep going on down all your blocks measuring them okay so now your problem is is that you need to now determine what your finished size is going to be it may not be 12 and a half maybe the majority of your blocks fell into one pile then that's your finished size no matter what it is that's your finished size so your job now is to take the other piles and make them what the majority is now hopefully you've only got one or two little lone Wolf's out there that you need to fix probably not okay but let's address the blocks that are too large okay so I'm gonna take up this block here let's look at this one okay so let's pretend this block came out a quarter of an inch bigger than all your other blocks if you cut this block down if you this is the seam allowance area right here between the end of this point and the raw edge that's where your seam is going to be right in here so if you cut any of this off your seam is going to come in to this point so you will lose your points on the block now here's where the decision comes in if you're gonna use just just lose a little bit of the point I wouldn't worry about it I would go ahead and cut it down and put it into your quilt but if you're losing a lot I recommend you figure out where you went wrong you might be able to take the block apart and save it and maybe just remake certain sections of it or you may have to just rebuild the whole thing okay but that's gonna be your decision do I cut it down or do I rebuild it so determine if your points are important to you it isn't to everybody so try to figure out what you want to do all right now let's address those blocks that really came out bad too small crooked a nightmare block this is mine when you're looking at it from a distance it looks fine but when you go to measure it it's really off so what you want to do when you have a block that came out too small first try to figure out what part is off maybe there's only one little piece that's off and you might be able to save this block so put your ruler deck back down on it all right and line it up now this section here ideally should have come out to three and a quarter inches as well as this row here this row in this row should have been three and a quarter and this six in a corner okay so line it up and see if those sections came out correctly well this one back here did but this one here didn't all right so now you need to look at this whole section and figure out where it went wrong this in here is correct this is the right size these two are off especially this one I recommend you go ahead and take this roll off and fix the two corners okay make them the correct size they were probably just cut wrong I think I was asleep when I made this block now let's suppose this block was off just a little bit all around so what I'm gonna do now is help you to increase this block size without having to rip it up and you're gonna fix it through the way you place your sashing on now you remember that pile your majority pile we're gonna pretend that that all of those in that pile would have the most blocks in it are twelve and three-eighths let's say they all came out 12 and three-eighths so your sashing strips are going to be cut two and a half inches wide by the length of your majority pile which was 12 and three-eighths so this is 12 and three-eighths here now let's pretend this block is 12 and a quarter so you're gonna place I'm going to turn this a little bit you're gonna place your sashing down on there and you're gonna make sure you have equal amounts of sashing hanging out on each end don't pull it all to where it's all overhanging on one end you want to Center your block on your sashing and push this sashing out now if all you need to do is increase this block by a quarter of an inch you just need to move it out slightly just a little bit to the center and then smooth it out okay and when you turn it over try to get this turned over you're gonna find that your sashing may be just hanging past the raw edge here just a little bit what it's doing is its straightening this edge out so then you would go ahead and pin it down now your quarter inch is going to be measured from the edge of the stashing so you're gonna come in a quarter of an inch and stitch it on all the way across I'm gonna go to another example here here is one where I've already put the sashing on both sides of the block okay I had to make this one a little bit and straighten out the edges so I'm going to turn it over now on this one the size came out correctly on this end but this end was off it came in a little bit so you'll see that my stashing is sticking out a little bit past here but not here and there's a little bit on the edges at each end so you're gonna measure from the edge of the stashing and go all the way across okay now you'll do that on both sides of your block I'm not going to go through the entire pressing process in this video I will address it in the next one but you'll be pressing your sashing now when you go to attach your next block now this block might be off also or it might be the correct size so you're going to Center this block on the sashing all right so Center it on there the edges maybe you're it's off a little bit the session might be sticking out a little that's fine you're increasing the block size slightly then go ahead measuring your quarter inch from that raw edge stitch all the way across okay now let's say you've got all of your blocks attached now and in this quilt there's gonna be three blocks in a row so let's say they're all attached now remember this block is small my sashing comes out on each in here so when you go to cut your long strip of sashing and I'm not gonna go into the size of the long strip just yet it will be addressed in in the next video you're gonna lay that Fasching down and you're gonna line it up on the edge of the sashing here and here okay lay it on there smooth it out don't try to pull it back and line it up with this raw edge smooth it out so that it's lined up with the ends of the sashing in between the blocks so that when you turn it over you'll see that there's going to be a little bit of an overhang that's fine then you're going to go ahead and stitch and measure from the raw edge of the sashing and stitch all the way across okay so that's how you can increase some of your blocks a little bit okay well I hope that that was helpful to you I know I probably didn't address every problem you might have had please leave a comment in the comment section if you need any help with an issue that you're having with one or more of your blocks and I will try real hard to answer it now in the next video we're gonna put the sashing on the whole quilt and let me get it here and I'm gonna show you what its gonna look like once it's got all of the sashing on it okay so here we go this is what its gonna look like alright okay so now to keep informed on all my future videos so that you get that information right away subscribe click on either one of my subscribe buttons there's one down there in the lower right hand corner throughout the entire video it's red and it says subscribe click on that one at any time then towards the end of the video in the upper right hand corner is a little picture of me that will suddenly appear that is also a subscribe button click on either one of those make sure you enter your email address the next time I have a new video youtube send you an email with a big button in the center you click on that button and it takes you directly to my latest video I'm Cheryl and I'm really glad you came to my sewing room I'll see you next time and happy sewing

Channel: The Sewing Room Channel

Views: 48,490

Rating: 4.908257 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilting, beginner's sampler quilt, how to square a quilt block, squaring a quilt block, kwilt, kwilting, kirkyama, sampler quilt, sampler quilts

Id: v3b6tojNqqI

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2017