Jean Wells - No Ruler Cutting

hello everyone we're here for our demo with gene Wells and some of our lovely customers are here gene what are you demoing today okay one of the things that I do when I'm wanting to learn a new task is to do something smaller or and to just play around some and this is a little sample you know that I've started and my other sample got made into a pincushion already what I love about this technique is that it also allows me to experiment and I'm always wanting to try new color palettes I just find it I'll see something and think well how would that work together when I pulled I just pulled off our little fat quarter things for this one and I have no idea so it's really each of them intensified you know but that wasn't planned and that spontaneity is what I really yes and also it's like playtime so so I'm going to get started and I usually work about eight inches in length if this was for something specific and I needed to have like a seven and a half inch block when I was done I would add an inch and they'd be eight and a half because you always need to tidy up the ants when you're done and I use you know either the teeny rotary cutter or and I think they're not making this one anymore Olfa isn't that's what a net tells me she's not been able to get them or this size but I don't like the huge blade one because I can't see the fabric the the mechanism that holds the blade is so big that you can't even see what you're cutting and obviously that's fine when you have a ruler but we don't have a ruler so Holly you can come to the table oh it's our new bookkeeper she writes everybody's paychecks and I always stand when I cut too you know a lot of people get these little sewing stations together where they just swivel around in their chairs that I can keep that same pressure and I can really think about the line that I want to cut so I know always that I'm going to be taking a quarter inch away on either side of that fabrics so you don't want to get it too little the other thing is you think about the fabric always facing you with solids it doesn't matter but you know when I made this little piece with this print I obviously want it facing me or else we would have ended up with that which might be okay to of that your attention so now I thought I'd put the kind of orange color next and I take and barely overlap it over the orange and then I'm gonna keep my fingers over here as I'm cutting and I've gotten in this really bad habit of doing this as I can I'll tell you why because I the blade will start getting a little dull or something yet so I just do this and I've been trying to kind of stop but it doesn't always work real well so now I'm pulling it apart but I'm not just picking this up like this because I want to know how to sew it back together when I'm done and what you do is look at your board and this has to match up then we know it's going to sew together so I take the one on the right flip it over and I just hold it like that and you would think that that wasn't going to sew together because we're used to those straight lines where everything lines up but this will line up as you sew so I'm going to set that down for just a second and I use when I'm sewing what's called bunny tails just little scraps of fabric folded over and I sewn through one now and the presser foot is down and that way I can just read this in if because you're doing a quarter inch and you've got these kind of angles a lot of times the feed dog doesn't want to grab your fabric and then you have everything pushing down in the throat plate you have a big mess so I find if I just use a bunny tail starting and ending I don't have that issue I guess where I'm your juiced and I want to sew a quarter inch but this isn't like if you were off a thread or two it isn't like the quilt police are going to show up because in the end you know you press one direction yeah there but there isn't a lot of stress on any of these seams now um you might want to stand up so that you can kind of see what I'm doing here or else if you kind of keep your distance you could stand behind me yeah we have to make sure we're doing that distance I'm mow this throughout the whole next hour so yeah I'll do it over and over yeah um so I'm gonna hold up the top thread and then my right hand so here you want the top thread the top fabric so here's this fabric and this fabric in there like this and I scoot them so they end up like that so my right hand is just kind of pushing that fabric under the other one until they're right in front of the presser foot and then I saw about a half inch or an inch just depending on how curved it is and I'm gonna pull this out right now so you can see what it looks like see how things start matching up yet but you know my seam is just fine so I'm gonna go back you're on the wrong side mom flip it that's why you have your daughter Marie I am hovering aren't I you know what this thing can go slower so I yeah if you have the ability to slow it down a touch you know when you're first learning this because you're positioning those raw edges as you go okay then I've got my old bunny tail I'm just gonna slip in there and stop and then I don't lift up the presser foot so now I've got this and I can press in either direction but I usually press toward the dark but this little piece is supposed to kind of be a landscape with a feeler about it so I will try and press down because we know if we looked out that mountain would be in the distance so when your seam allowances are pressed away from it it helps and I'd really like to press with steam and crushing is this irony in this minutes like I remember my mother doing lots of ironing and these days we don't do a whole lot of ironing but when you're sewing I do an up-and-down motion because you're working with smaller pieces of fabric and you don't want to stretch them so there's my little seam I'm gonna do it another one now so just in case you need to see it twice you're gonna be doing it for a whole hour mom um and when I'm sewing at home when I finish doing something I kind of toss it in a pile and one of the things that I find happens it's just these wonderful little surprises is that you aren't trying to organize it and putting them next to each other and they might be really good in your piece so see I I'm really auditioning this looks too dull to me oh go figure [Laughter] no mom you don't know every store the girls call this jean dream so and I'm following the last cut that I made that's my pattern and I didn't do this once good job my machine and I line up the first inch edges you can see where the big curve is is for that oranges and again your left hand holds up the top fabric your right hand slides the bottom fabric and tell they're next to each other I just thought of what I'm going to tell you next time on the next seam I have one more thing to tell you what's now I know cuz it'll work better I show you I did kind of a little curvy thing there yeah you have a big curve uh-huh but it worked so how big since no one here is asking questions I will ask you questions how big of a curve like I mean how dramatic can you do without getting little bubbles so that's about as curvy as you can get well let me come in on that on that kind of curve okay hold that up let me see yeah cuz I think that that's the test like how much of a curve can you get before you start but what you do is snip in only an eighth of an inch if you slip in more than an eighth and sometimes you'll get those places where you won't have this nice line so the seams are a scant quarter inch or quarter inch quarter inch sometimes in those scans yes it is and you know because I'm only working eight inches on this eight inches long I do you want me to go get you some hey Nancy would you go get some water for the iron please thank you um so what I want to do if you were doing something let's say more than twelve mom there's a question someone snow what's up with the little square at the beginning in the end we explained bunnytail to people again you're live on Facebook okay so go ahead and she obviously didn't know she was live on Facebook she thought I was just videoing that would be a big fat no mom your life we and Deborah wants to know how you like the ever so we love our ever shows they're good machines Michele she snips curves after she shows up I'd being I being beckoned hold off I use I like these chalk pencils because I know the charcoal come out but I am marking in the seam allowance so I've also used lead pencil these are lighter colored fabrics so I'm going to use the lead pencil and what I will do is put a little mark on the green and on the wife and I I put them Oh about four to six inches apart and I'm not measuring I'm guessing if any other thing here if it matches up here and you line these up then it's going to line other than you sell it if you've sewn close at all you remember notches call it not and this is creating the same effect now we'll pretend like this was a deeper curve and I love these loci scissors and I keep this size here for me because a lot of times I'll even cut little pieces while I'm sewing but I'm going to snip in just an eighth of an inch on the inside curve and if you just remember the inside curve okay there you go Michelle that was your answer for the curve for the cutting making you nervous whatever we do have to have humor not Narsha it is your shop so you get to decide okay so now I'm going to lift that up yep well of course it's only an inch and a half so it's me good so and now as I'm coming toward where I made those snips the fabric just spreads apart becomes more of a straight line rather than that inside curve that it was I was determined to see how much of this I could do and I should have brought a piece I made but it actually had curves that went like that and I was able to do it I always leave a little extra on the outside though that I can trim off but yeah it was really fun yeah anybody who wants to know the demo videos will be up on our YouTube channel as soon as I upload them so in case you want to see it closer up because I'm really up in her grill right now so well and now I just in case this is what the bunny tail does someone was asking so what this does is when she puts this in here it keeps all your threads nice and tidy for when you start your next seam and you don't get that rat nest underneath [Music] so have you ever done these like with super super long pieces mom or do you big curvy lines but it started all going uh-huh yeah yeah so you started register marked then I started sewing from one end the first time and the other end the next time so I switched out so you know I would sew from this end for this scene but then this you know it's it's kind of all those little things that you do with regular sewing too and see how these aren't lining up perfect at the bottom and when I cut them I was trimming them so they are the same but that top fabric the one that you will have some cool with it but you want to make sure you're not tugging it to me because that's well also if you make it all a little bit bigger you're going to square it up right and I brought some examples here I learned how to do this and you can see where it's narrower here and wider here but I put a little piece of white in between every single one so there's a lot of thickness here on the side from all of that but you know I got the effect that I wanted and this photograph that I saw when I got ready to do this was antique knitting needles in Martha Stewart and such a cool photo while there was you know a really cool tip in on the needles so I made sure I put ends every once in a while but I didn't want to put them every time and the thing that was interesting to me - was that all the knitting needles were the same length so you got all these different links and as I started making it my own restaurant they were always busy Friday nights so that was a big sewing night for me and I got down to about here and I realized that was getting wider and you know normally that patchwork were all on top of another quilt so it's like two quilts and I call this a portrait finish because it kind of looks like matboard to a framer and this little guy you know it's just made plain with fabrics you can see all these little purple things I had they're different sizes but to put it together everything is done horizontally so you can have a lot of variety in here like for this one this thing that's owed to a piece of yellow here as if this one and then this piece of yellow got put in between here then over here this was a whole section I so this to it and this to it then added the yellow out here and the final seam is here so it's just it's kind of like doing a puzzle and happy to start at that smallest part figuring out where to go but I call that sort of composition totem because it reminds me of a totem pole or whatever or stacked rocks sometimes you see stacked rocks this little piece isn't very curvy but yet all the lines were cut without a ruler and I was trying to be just kind of straighten up the line so that it had more of a severe feeling you know sometimes these get very organic where I blessed of an organic feeling in this and these were I had put all those fabrics in a little baggie for some reason and cleaning my steel arch I found the bag I thought well I'm gonna do something with that so and then this little piece is similar to the idea of this where I just went pick six things and so I put together these book these two blocks she wasn't happy with them he did it it was just so intense this yellow just seems so strong this little guy and my next thought was okay I could eliminate something so I made this blog and to me it's much calmer but there's none of this yellow in it or did I take anything else out no I think it's just that yellow so when I was doing the lecture series on color I had these and I said you know I really still not sure I like on well the minute that was done filming she said huh where's your family she pulled this blue out so any questions so when you put that together you're gonna I'll have to do it like I did that one yeah I will piece puzzle and these she were gonna be pin cushions to their back on him oh I'll probably just cut him off oh that's so a mom like that why that and be sewing on this way afterwards but then I can make this one the same way then I would just need I would need to see him across here to put the yellow in and then I would need so then I'd have a seam that's going here then I would sew a little piece of glue to the end of that and they'd end down here and then I would have a seam here and a steam on the other side and you know what I do when I'm figuring this stuff I have to put it on a piece of paper and go so if this one to this and this to this and and I will put a dotted line but you really put to use like your engineering skills you don't worry too much about grain I always you know though my strips are you know like this is crosswise grain this is you know I couldn't have someone to bias little pieces and it wouldn't matter but if I wanted to I agonal least if I wanted to have gray next to it which I don't but that's then I lay the tan on the grade so I and I could if I wanted this really really straight I could take and lay a ruler on there and you don't have to go and make a 45 or a 60 or 90 you know all those numbers on your ruler you just do it what you want and so at this point I would then like flip this over and I could sew back together so the technique works for a lot of things um what I love about it is that when I'm in the classroom and all these people are sewing and everything and I wish how I'm starting making strata and they'll make a pieces you know maybe about this long by the time I finish demoing them and whatever is that everybody's line work is different it's like it's sure your signature and I get to the food I can recognize people's work like if I see a piece of the magazine or something or even if somebody sends me something a lot of times all of what student it was because I get so I can recognize I'm going to ask a question about the logic kind of answered that already it likes to go this way well there's other companies that make small ones and then I went to a workshop a couple months later and this woman was using these and she was so much faster and so I went one and a cutting board and a ruler and tried it myself but I did I just felt like this guy was but I didn't use this one for years because once these came out this became my tool and I just don't like this one a lot but there's something about this one that I feel like I can if I want to get really intricate you know I can alright Facebook live we're signing off ask lots of questions we'll answer

Channel: Stitchin' Post

Views: 7,739

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Id: UkOr81o7RUw

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020