It Takes Two | National Quilters Circle

have you ever looked at a difficult quilt or a difficult quilt block and decided it was just too hard to make chances are that quilt block has some challenging elements in it like curved piecing or set in seams and I don't know about you but I don't do curved piecing or set in seams so I would like to show you some tricks that I've learned to make these difficult looking blocks very easy the first block is just your basic four patch four patch block with a circle so the base of the block is a four patch generally these curved pieces are curved piecing and a little bit challenging to do but I'm going to show you the easy way to make this block since this basic block is a four patch you're going to need two matching four patch blocks it doesn't matter what size block you want to make you just need to make sure that these are both the same size the first thing you're going to do is decide what size you want your circle these blocks I have cut they are eight inch blocks so they'll finish at seven and a half inches so I drew a circle that is five and a half inches you can make a bigger circle that will fill up more of your block or you can make a smaller circle for just an accent circle so the first thing you need to do is draw your circle on a piece of paper as well as drawing your horizontal and vertical lines in the center of the circle then you're going to take your steam a seam or if you'd rather use it do hand applique you can use freezer paper and you're going to take your seam a seam and you're going to trace your circle on your steam a seam including the horizontal and vertical lines and then you're going to roughly cut around the steam a seam you're going to take your take one of your four patch blocks and you're going to Center the circle on the back of the block you're going to use these lines as your guide and they need to go on the seam lines of your block so after you've matched them up as best you can you'll take your iron and you will gently press after you've pressed it and it's cooled you'll cut out your circle right on the drawn line now of course if you prefer to do turned edge applique you will need to allow for a 3/16 to a quarter inch seam allowance for turned edge applique so after you've cut your circle you'll peel your fusible web off the back of your circle and you'll turn it so that the colors are contrasting and then you'll press it in place and it's as easy as that you'll get that curved edge look without the curved edge piecing now at this point you can either blanket stitch around it by hand or by machine or you can do a small zigzag whichever you prefer but that's the easy way to make this fun block so that's the basic four patch block here's another basic four patch block where I've added some a four patch smaller square in the center now traditionally you would have a couple of seams in this block to get this look but if you take two matching four patch blocks and you cut your square out of one of the blocks it was like this you just need to rotate at 90 degrees and you press it on there like that then you'll have no seams you have to worry about you can do this with a lot of different shapes and a lot of different sizes this is a quarter square triangle block with the circle in the center and to make that block you'll need two matching quarter-square triangle blocks you'll take one and cut a circle out of it then rotate it and press it on and you have this very cool look you can also do it with a pinwheel block this is your basic pinwheel block so you would need to matching pinwheel blocks cut a circle out of the back of one and you'll rotate it and press it on and it looks very cool and it looks very hard on only you know will know that it's very easy this one is my favorite block of all this has the circle but also the circle cut out of the center of it this block is called a wagon wheel block and traditionally is made with lots of curved piecing but you don't have to make it like that you just need your two matching pinwheel blocks you'll cut your circle out of the 1 block and you'll rotate it press it on and voila very easy so this is a really fun way to make fun quilts that maybe have a little bit busier prints mixed with kind of almost some solid prints because the contrast is what really makes this quilt and this quilt block work I'm going to show you a couple of examples like I said you can make this block pretty much any size these are six inch blocks are sewn together to make a 12 inch block and I actually hand applicate these circles so I cut my circles out of freezer paper then prepared them for turned edge applique and just applicate them on the pinwheel blocks and as you can see these have a lot of contrast so it's very striking and very impressive this is another example of the wagon wheel block and it's just bigger and I also did hand applique on these blocks and again you can see the contrast really works with the polka dots and the almost solid colors and together they're very fun to look at because there's a lot of movement and it's colorful and it's just a fun blot to make this is an example of a quilt that one of my co-workers Denise made and she actually when she cut out her circle out of this fabric she very carefully cut the circle out of the center I just kind of cut and not really worry about it but she very carefully cut the circle out of the center and then she stitched it into the corners of her blocks and she did it with machine blanket stitch her circles on to her pinwheel blocks so this is a really fun way to add a little bit of interest to is by taking the Centers of these circles and putting them in the corners of your blocks so I hope that when you look at blocks like these that you won't be discouraged that you'll look at them in a different way and maybe try this technique and you can do it with squares diamonds you can play around with it and find lots of different ways that you can make these fun blocks that look very difficult but are really very easy

Channel: National Quilters Circle

Views: 197,453

Rating: 4.9012756 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class, quilting blocks, quilt blocks

Id: LAsLjQQpfLw

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 16 2014