How to Use Creative Grids Cats Cradle XL Ruler | Down the Rabbit Hole Week 2

this week again i hope you guys got your pieces cut i hope you had a good weekend memorial day weekend and again i answered questions over the weekend about the project and i'm going to go through how to sew both the traditional method and the ruler method today and then we're going to do some other stuff i do want to ask we are looking to do a blog post about our sew along in the last week of june first week of july so as you guys are doing your projects if you take pictures of your progress or your finished blocks or your finished quilt top please email all those to me at heidi at the whimsical workshop and we will use that some of them in our post to just share about it and if you have any comments you want us to include or any anything that you think we should put in our blog please send it to me and we will review it and again compilate it all together and make a nice blog post for the end of the month end of june the due date to have those pictures to us would be january june 26th and again if you don't have your quilt top done just take a picture of your block we just want to see what colors you use or fabrics and how you may have changed the design which is completely okay we want you to change your designs if you want to so that would be the big thing is if you do send us pictures in progress i'd love to see what you guys are doing we are going to do a few more sew alongs going forward i am going to look to do one on zoom so that we can actually interact face to face and not type in comments but i will have more info on that a little bit later but for today i'm going to pan the camera down so that you guys can see what i am doing and then after this we realized that uh when we do a youtube or facebook live video a couple things one they flip it so it's mirror image of what you actually see so it looks like i'm a lefty and i'm cutting with my right hand two we've noticed the quality of the video is very very grainy for the first week which sadly i didn't shoot on other cameras so that is the only footage we have for today though i am shooting on other cameras so the video will not go up a lot or go up right after the live cast it will go up later today or tomorrow once i get all of the video compilated cleaned up flipped the right way and um that it's not grainy so just bear with us give us a day to get that pulled together and get it posted so if you did miss it you will see it tomorrow um so let's pan you down don't get motion sickness here first let's go over the traditional method the traditional method last week when you cut it you had to cut two of these triangles a four in a half a square inch square and a two and seven eighths inch triangle or i'm sorry two and seven eighths an eight and seven eighths inch square that you cut across the diagonal so these are the pieces you need for a traditional block so i'm going to give you some tips on sewing these i have it all stepped out for you so you didn't have to wait for me to sew but the first thing is you're going to sew this triangle to this square so it goes like this now you can sew from either end you can sew from this end down i brought my purple thing to help you point from this end down but i find this much much easier for the first triangle to start at the right angle and sew from this end down and that as long as you don't pull the triangle and you just let it lay flat it will put it in the right place because this corner is aligned so once you've done that you then have the triangle i like to press towards the triangle whether it's light or dark it's not more it's more of an issue of how the block will lay so in this case even if this was white and this was blue i would still press towards the triangle that is my preference if you do not like seeing the seam through it um then you could press towards the square it's not going to hurt it it's just going to lay a little differently so you have this guy on now you need to sew this triangle on and i can show you the number one thing i always do with these and end up having to tear them is i will lay this on here like this for whatever reason and then it flips out wrong or i will lay it on here like that so it flips out wrong so i'll do this sew it on and then it flips out wrong so you want to make sure that you lay your block out the way it should appear turn it the way you're going to feed it through the machine whether it's this way or this way then flip the triangle over and you're ready to sew so on this one again you can align the right angle and sew down but i find on this triangle you get a much more accurate seam if you flip the whole thing over align your right angle and this little dog ear here this little v that you see right here that should be on your quarter inch right there so your needle should go between those two triangles and you can adjust it accordingly you can fudge it a little just to get it to hit right as long as you keep this aligned so i would start there and sew down so to recap the first triangle start at the right angle and sew down the second triangle i like to start at the tip of the little triangle and sew down i find that gives me a much more accurate top up here okay so we have those two now once you're done with that here's where we sewn that is right in the v you you would press this open and you should have a quarter inch from that v to that top edge which is right here i've already pressed it open for us sort of it's kind of still wrinkly so if for whatever reason this isn't quite a quarter inch from here we have to trim our dog ears so you take a ruler and you lay it on here and you can align the quarter inch of the ruler with the top of the colored square and trim now these are all biasy edges out here you only want to trim this much even if this looks like it's sticking up let's see if i can mimic it even if this is sticking out like that up there don't trim it or this down here because what that is is bias and it's stretching on you and as long as you just trim at this point this quarter inch away from this point you don't want to trim all of this this has all been cut correctly so we want to leave that alone and only trim from here to here trust me it will all lay nice i'm going to hold this up here i'm not sure how to get it so you can see it better let's try this there we go so you can see my point was not a quarter inch away but with the dog ears there i have enough material to make that quarter inch because this is where you want the needle to hit when you sew the next triangle on so even if you leave it and i did this on purpose even if you just leave a little nib there to give you some excess so when you're sewing your quarter inch seam you can hit that point you'll be okay and you're gonna this will be clearer when i put the next triangle on and i did this to show you guys that so now that we've trimmed them you need to sew the big triangle the two big triangles together so when you align these two big triangles again we're dealing with bias and bias can distort and stretch so do not assume you cut this wrong it could just have gotten distorted ironing it handling it breathing on it but if you lay the two triangles together you would align the right angle again okay and you want to align your straight sides and now look here and this should be you can see it because i picked the yellow you can see this guy is about a sixteenth of an inch shy of matching the edge this is the beauty of this block we do not need to worry about that you just want to put the bigger triangle on the bottom align the right edges as long as this is less than an eighth of an inch i know my perfectionists are cringing but if it's less than an eighth of an inch you will then use your quarter inch guide along the yellow triangle and sew your quarter inch you can see here where i trimmed this it matches exactly because i trimmed it a quarter inch away so you would just sew your quarter inch hit the magic point and continue down this 16th of an inch in your seam allowance is going to be mean nothing it is as long as you use that back triangle as a guide no one's going to see the back of your quilt so do not worry about it so then once you've sewn your big triangle onto your little triangle i like to press towards the big triangle and i'm going to show you this close so you can see you can see here see the yellow peeking out but now my block is an eight and a half inch square block at least it should be there we go eight and a half inches so we have it because we didn't worry about this little excess here you want to always use the big solid triangle as your guide and i hope that was clear and you guys understood that if you don't you can always email me call me we can zoom and walk through it so that is the traditional method press it towards the big triangle get rid of your dog ears you don't want to leave these little nibs in there because when you go to quilt your quilt or have a quilter quilt them their machine will the needle will hit that nib and it'll just screw up the quilting so this is just some insurance so that your quilting comes out right so there is the finished block traditional method now we're going to move on to the ruler method the ruler method uses the cat's cradle extra large ruler and this one required no triangles and it's got does require trimming so let me show you how we put this one together for this one you had to cut four and three quarter inch squares and a four and three quarter i'm sorry i have to remember this by five and three quarter rectangle it comes with the directions in the ruler but i'm going to walk you through it as well first you would sew a square onto a rectangle and a square onto a rectangle the directions will tell you if you forget to press towards the background okay so you want it towards the black in my case are white if you have one of the kits and then you take these and you're going to sew them together like this with a quarter inch seam which is we're going to switch colors through this because i didn't have enough of one fabric so you sew those together and they look like this get these out of our way okay now before you press these you're going to want a pair of nice little sharp scissors like that the directions show you this as well but you're going to fold this in half you're going to take your nice sharp scissors slide it into the fold and you're going to cut that seam allowance up to the stitching but not through the stitching all right so up to this white line but not through it if you cut through it you'll have to take it over the sewing machine re-sew it and you'll be fine but you don't want to cut through it if you can help it then you need to go ahead and press this and how you press this is you're going to press from this side but you're going to press this square down and because of that cut you're going to press the square up that's going to give you nice flat seams all your block seams will go the same because we're building two blocks at one time so there is that step so then we here it is cut and we open it up and they lay nice and flat everything is pressed towards the background the next step is to mark the back of your block following the directions and using the cat's cradle ruler so how you do this is lay there is a side get my board here here's the ruler these squares correlate with the square on your fabric that you've sewn so you're going to lay the ruler on the square oh wait i'm sorry right now we need the place on seam line square so that's the line we want it's still a right angle square it goes on our square we're going to align the black line on the sewn line not out here but on your actual sewn line okay and then you're going to draw a line along the edge of the ruler now one thing i have learned over time of using this pull this out of the way again is you can do this you can align it here and here and this guy could be over here he can be over here so what i do is a little added insurance is i align it on my seam and i align this on the corner and i don't worry about this end and then i draw a line and i'm using a chalk pencil mainly because this is black but you also want to make sure you use a wash out pencil or something that won't show through your fabric because this is your seam line and if you use a black sharpie so to speak you will see that if you use white fabric so there's my first line marked then you rotate it around and you repeat with the other side and again i align it on my sewing line and if i have to slide it just a little to hit that point i will do so just so that it's close to that point now we're going to trim these up so it's not it doesn't have to be exact but it does help that triangle be a little more triangle shape and less polygon shape so there are two lines with the ruler next step is to put these two with their background so this is the large this is the 9 by 10 inch rectangle we had you cut and you match it up with its correlating colors these you don't want these to be the same fabrics and again you can do like we did and pair up your fabrics so this becomes one block and then the big blue and the coral small become a second block or you can just mix them up and they're all random so now we lay this on here and we sew on our drawn line which is what i've done here now we need to cut this apart and you may if you have gone ahead and read the directions there is a typo in the cat's cradle extra-large ruler and i can explain where it came from at least this is what i assume happened it tells you to use the edge of the ruler the quarter inch seam line on the edge of the ruler and if you look at this ruler there is no quarter inch seam line on that edge of the ruler so the reason that happened is if you look at the the smaller cat's cradle ruler which was came first it does have it it does have a quarter inch seam line this one doesn't i don't now that i'm saying that maybe yeah this isn't long enough and on the little guy it is long enough so how that is is there is no quarter inch seam line on the bottom of the ruler don't make yourself crazy looking for it just take another ruler that does have a quarter inch seam that is long enough and you align the quarter inch line on the ruler with your sewn line and you cut and that will give us our first cat's cradle block then you flip the shape around use the quarter inch line on the sewn line and you cut again so now we have our two cat's cradle blocks all done and they're ready to be pressed and trimmed so here here is the one colorway or the one way out of the two fat quarter pairs here is the other out of the fat quarter pairs so then we're ready to trim these up and then we bring in our martelli turn table if you happen to have one of these i love this turntable um it's a whole turntable system so how it works is there's the turntable then they give you if you buy the whole set you get the pressing board so you can press and turn and then they give you the cutting mat and i love the fact that because some of us are going to cut more than others and we may wear this out you just can replace the mat you don't have to replace the entire system and i use these anytime this anytime i'm using my cat's cradle rulers because you have to square these up and how you would do it is now we're going to use this part we're going to use these squares they're all labeled four and a half five i don't have all the way up to eight and we're gonna use that part of the ruler to square up the first side and these have been squared up so i can just lay it on here you'll see it's all clean but we're going to do that one okay so i'm going to finger press this open i would take it to the iron i'm shooting a video so i'm not going to do that um go to the iron and press it towards the big triangle this is one of those do as i say not as i do okay we got that nice and flat so i'm going to take my ruler i'm going to align the eight inch square with my eight inch square on the block and i'm going to trim rotate let's see how i can rotate the block without moving everything when you have to do two or three hundred of these which in our i think our dancing dots uses 144 of these that's a lot of them and they're smaller so if you can just spin it and cut and spin it and cut it's great now the next line you need to cut the other side are these dotted lines these that go across the ruler we're using the largest one so we're using the last dotted line but those are also labeled the same label for the squares goes for the dotted line and so what you do is you lay the dotted line on your square and you want to make sure that the edge here of each dotted line matches up with the edge of the black triangles because you've already squared those up you don't want this like this you want it so each end is on the fabric and then you go ahead and square that up so that is how you're going to make all of your blocks from either traditional or the ruler method and let's move this out of the way here so for next week we're going to have all our blocks sewn and i'm going to talk about the layout um and the pieced border that i'm going to try to come up with between now and next week so these are all of these so you should end up with four of each colorway so this is one two three four of those one two there'll be four of those and you should have four into 48 you should have 12 different pairs so then we can lay out our blocks next week and there's different ways you can lay out your blocks so let me bring this guy back up one of the nice things about zoom which is why i want to try that for our next so long is that i can have different camera angles and i can just click on the angle so you can have me have that have the ironing board it's going to make things a little more fun so keep keep stay tuned for that any questions on sewing any of this this is a pretty easy one to start for so long let me just go through my list see if i missed anything again if you want to post any of your picture or you want us to include any of your pictures of your project in our blog post try to have that well please have those to us by june 26th that will be the cut-off date i can't promise everything will go in depending on how much we get but we will do our very best to include your definitely the final photos or your block photos so if you don't finish your top just send me a couple picture a couple of your blocks stay tuned tomorrow for the video if you missed today's live cast and then again for next week if you have your blocks done i'm going to i think try to make this into a design wall so we can lay out the blocks there's a couple different ways you can lay this out and get different looks so you don't necessarily have to follow my layout for this if you finish your box between now and then and you want to play with it play with it on your design wall see how they look see if you want to have them off center like i have or if you want to do star blocks in the center but we'll go through all that next week and i want to share with you what i would like to do for our next project um i am going to do this i hope you might join me this is our dutch wonderland quilt it is a pattern available on our website and the reason i want to do this is one i have to make the sample for um cloth works this was a collaboration with cloth works using their uh hang on if you ever wonder what group we use it's always in the back cover this is their dappled group and they did it in two different colorways they did the cool and the warm and we're going to be making the warm but there are eight different blocks in the quilt so i'm going to do a video on each block and you can choose to learn just that block or in the end you can put all your blocks together and have this beautiful quilt that is going to start the third week in june and my question to all of you so please leave in the comment below is if we're doing live videos would it be easier to have them on a saturday morning versus a weekday morning depending on the results of what people tell me i will do it on either june start on june 17th or start on june 20th 17th is a wednesday the 20th is a saturday but i'd like as many people to participate as we can get so please just leave me a comment below which would work best in your schedule uh if you have a schedule at this point a lot of people are still stay at home and i hope you've enjoyed our video this week and i look forward to seeing all your finished blocks next week so make sure you send me pictures or post them in the group let people see what you're doing let's share over this so it's more of a community project and less me talking to you but i hope you've all enjoyed and i look forward to seeing you next week have a good week i hope you've enjoyed this video and if you have make sure you like and subscribe below you can find the whimsical workshop on our website thewimschoolworkshop.com and that has all links to all of our other social media platforms thanks for joining us

Channel: TheWhimsicalWorkshop

Views: 204

Rating: 4.8000002 out of 5

Keywords: heidi pridemore, the whimsical workshop, sew along, quilt, tutorial, beginner, down the rabbit hole, project, DIY, sew along tutorials, quilting tutorial, sew along patterns, creative grids, cats cradle quilt block, learn to quilt, cats cradle, quilting tutorials 2020, how to quilt, creative grids rulers, cats cradle block, quilting tutorial for beginners, learn to quilt for beginners, cats cradle quilt block pattern, creative grids rulers videos, creative grids rulers youtube

Id: _nevOjkkfUg

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020