Make a UNIQUE Dresden Plate Quilt

this idea for a quilt has been sitting on the back of my mind for a really long time it's really something that I have been thinking through for a while in wanting to work on I have slowly been working through different ideas that I've had to make this quilt come together and work so hopefully I finally have a lot of it together but it might be kind of a work in progress because I decided I just need to go for it if I ever want to get this project made I have been slowly collecting components for this project some of the fabric that I'm using I just recently purchased because I've been waiting a while and looking around trying to find the perfect fabric for this idea I really want this quilt to sort of look like a collage what the idea is is for it to kind of look like a page from a junk Journal I really love seeing different ideas for Junk journals on different social media sites like Pinterest and Tick Tock I love the way they look but I honestly don't have time to start a junk Journal so I thought why not make my quilt kind of look like a page from a junk Journal I am really so excited about this project and I hope that you enjoy it too alright so let me start with showing you the fabric I'm using for the project and then I'll show you some of the other things that I'll be using to make this quilt come together alright so here is the bundle of fabric that I purchased for this quilt and I purchased this fabric from quiltingcat.com this is 12 plus yards of fabric and it is purchased as a bundle and I got it for a great deal I only paid sixty dollars for this bundle of fabric all right so there are all the Fabrics in the kit they are so beautiful and I'm honestly so excited to see this quilt come together to me it really does have a vintage feel to it I'm really looking forward to bringing this all together so there are a few other things that I gathered for this project to make it look like I am envisioning and one of those items is doilies I have been collecting these from antique shops in my area and I'm really excited to incorporate them into this quilt so here are some of the doilies that I'm going to be using in this project I really love doilies and all the different designs that they come in I they're also different different sizes different styles and I really love them and have been wanting to work them into a quilt for a while so I'm really hoping adding their doilies in will give this the look that I am looking for on this quilt one of the other tools I'm going to be using in this project is a Dresden template so this template is going to help me make the petals on a Dresden plate now I received this template in one of my open gate quilt boxes I will link to this tool in the description of this video if it's something you think that might help you along the way in this project so now that we've gone through everything I'm going to be using for this project you might have noticed me talking about the Dresden petal template and that might include you in that we'll probably be making this into a Dresden quilt and you will be right on that guess now one thing I really want you to take note of is that this is not going to be like a traditional Dresden plate quilt because I want it to look like kind of a page from a junk journal or a collage it is going to be a assembled in a completely different way than this quilt would traditionally be assembled so please keep that in mind I do think it's going to be a lot of fun and hopefully give you some ideas on how to think outside the box when you are making a quilt all right so I am going to start getting all of my Fabric starched and after I get it really soaked with the starch I'm going to let it dry some and then I'll be pressing the fabric after I get it pressed I'm going to be cutting out the Petals For This quilt as well as getting the blocks for the back of the quilt to cut too now I'm not going to sit here and go through all the cut sizes and all of that for this quilt what I will do is I'll put them up on the screen here so that you can take a screenshot of it or you can go down to the description of this video and find all of the dimensions there I feel like that will probably really help you for this quilt now when I choose all my Fabrics that I am going to be using for this quilt because I don't think I will be needing all of the fabric here when I choose that fabric I'll try to note down how much I'm going to be needing for all of it but it might not be completely accurate because this is going to be a little bit of a scrappy design however I will do my best to make sure that you have all of the cut requirements you'll need and hopefully a good idea of how much fabric you will need all right so let's get this quilt going all right so I have all of my fabric cut for the project I have all of my background squares these are 18.5 by 18.5 inch squares and I have nine cut for the quilt top so here are all my petals cut for the quilt top there are a ton of them and I have them all paired together how I want to piece the dresden's each of the plates are just going to have two colors alternating around it and I've paired all those colors together so I can keep them together and remember how I had them combined so since I want these to be paired together very specifically I'm going to chain piece them when I chain piece them they'll all be hooked together and I won't snip the threads until I get to the end of the sets being sewn together that way I can keep them all together and nice and organized so I sew them together as I intended so to sew these together it's actually quite simple you are just going to fold them right sides together and you can see I have the wider edge here and then the smaller Edge is at the bottom we're not going to sew the bottom Edge right now so we're just going to fold these right sides together and sew a quarter inch seam along here so I'm going to back stitch at the beginning and the end each time I sew and then I'm going to clip the corner that's by the fold just a little bit there I'm not going to go through the threads or anything and in my Dresden template package I got this turning tool here that is very helpful for making the pill the petals so I'm going to turn it and I can use the tool here to really poke out that point really nicely now when I'm working on these I like to press this seam inside here open but you can press it to the side if you would like as well so and just like that the petal is finished I do like to press these seams as well and that'll keep it nice and flat and crisp and ready for sewing so for each plate you'll need 20 of these petals and like I said for the top of the quilt I'm going to alternate between two colors so like I said before I'm going to chain piece these together in sets because I think it'll make it a lot easier so I just put these right sides together and sew that quarter inch seam so I'm going to back stitch at the beginning of the end that's not something I normally do while I am piecing however here because we're going to be flipping these and manipulating them a lot pushing out seams you really want to make sure it's nice and secure so here I am starting the next one I'm not clipping any threads and I'll just sew all 20 of these together and then cut the threads at the end of that and start another batch for another plate all right so then when I get to the end I'm just going to clip the threads and then I have my long chain of petals all sewn together in they're nice and organized so I'm going to set these to the side and get the rest of mine sewn together all right so I have my petals sewn and I went ahead and clipped all of them together that go to one plate just to keep them all organized so now I'm going to start sewing them together to create the Dresden plate so to do that I'm going to make sure that I alternate but I have here one of my darker colors and one of my lighter backgrounds and I'm going to put them right sides together and then I will sew a quarter inch seam so just like before I'm going to back stitch at the beginning of the end because I want these to hold together really well before I get to where I can uh applique them in place onto the background of the quilt okay so I have my first seam sewn and that is how it looks and so I'll just keep alternating the petals I'm just going to put them right sides together making sure I go back and forth between a light and a darker petal and I'll just keep working in that manner until I have all 20 of them sewn together creating a circle all right all right so normally with a Dresden plate quilt you'll have your block that your Dresden plate is going to be attached to and you'll normally do that before you piece the quilt top together for this quilt I'm going to piece the blocks together first and you'll understand why when I start laying everything out so to piece the quilt top together it's going to be very very simple I'm just going to sew three of these blocks together so I'll lay them down right sides together and sew a quarter inch seam and once I get three blocks in each row I will sew those rows together so you'll end up with a three by three block quilt top so kind of like a very big oversized nine patch all right so as I said this is very much going to be a work in progress quilt that will likely change as I go and I think that's okay because I really want this like I said to look like a page from a junk journal and be very much have a collage feel to it once I piece this nine patch background I realized that my Dresden plate doesn't quite fit in the squares as I hoped I should have gone a little larger to probably a 20 inch square rather than an 18.5 inch square so keep that in mind if you don't want to do what I'm going to do next on yours what I decided to do was pull some fabric from my stash and I had this gorgeous like newsprint fabric that I thought would work great in this quilt so so pretty now what I did was I cut it into strips and I pieced strips together to be long enough to work on my quilt and I did some three inch strips and some 1.5 inch strips and what I'm going to do is add these going horizontally and diagonally across my quilt to add some more width and length to it and I really think it's going to add a nice Scrappy background on this quilt to really help it actually end up looking exactly like I was hoping it would look in the end so I'll show you how I'm going to do that and how I'm going to make it work all right so here is the top of my quilt and this is the large 18 inch Square now what I'm going to do is line up my ruler on the two inch line and then I'm going to cut a strip across here I do have this folded in half just so I can cut a little more quickly and I tried to line up the seam the best I could to be able to do that so I'm going to cut across here two inches up from the seam now my ruler didn't quite extend across so what I'm going to do is line up on the seam over here again and cut across again all right so now I have a slit separating the top of my quilt and the bottom of my quilt so what I'll be doing is putting one of my small 1.5 inch strips across here so I'll sew that in place after I get that in place I'm going to cut another slit below this line here and I'm going to cut that three inches away so two and then three so I'm going to get that cut I'm going to get this piece that cut and it all sewed together and I'll show you what it looks like so far after that all right so here are the slits on the first side but in and I think the strips are really going to add some fun interest to the back of this quilt and help it really look like a collage so I'm going to do that same thing along each side so it's going to go along here along that seam then along this seam and then along the seam here so it's going to kind of be an inner border type thing around the entire quilt so I'll show you what it looks like once I get all of those strips put in along the outer seams of the quilt so hopefully here you can see those slits a little bit better here's that thinner strip that's that's 1.5 inch strip and then where we cut the two inch strip away from the seam we cut three inches down and this is that three inch strip here so hopefully you can kind of see how that's all coming together what I'm going to do now is work along this seam and do the same thing so I'll cut that slit that's two inches up from the seam here and attach the strip through here again and then cut three inches down and place that wider strip along here and then I'll to turn the quilt and do the same thing along this side and then along the other side I'm so glad that I decided to work with this quilt as is instead of re-cutting my fabric because I really think this is going to turn out really nice as is rather than starting over with my original idea and cutting all the fabric again all right so after finishing up the background of the quilt and getting all of the Dresden plates sewn together so I have all nine of them sewn together for the quilt top so after getting the background and the dresden's all finished I decided to go ahead and get the circles ready these are going to go in the center of the Dresden plates so to get the circles ready I just used what I had in my quilt space that I knew would work for the center of the quilt and I used that to trace out the circles on my fabric so once I traced out the circles on the fabric I went ahead and cut out the circles and then I cut out a template out of card stock that was a bit smaller than the circle I wanted it about a quarter of an inch space around the template and from between the template and the end of the fabric so a quarter inch so I could fold it over you could just leave the circle's raw Edge if you would like but I wanted to make sure there wasn't any fraying because that was the look that I wanted so to fold the fabric back and keep it nice and even I used the template to iron over the edge to get it to stay in place I used my easy press pen from Acorn and I also added a little bit of stray spray starch as well now I iron that over you'll want to be really careful because it does get really hot but for me that was the fastest way to do it you could also use some needle and thread to go around the template and hold it in place that way cinch it all together there's a couple different methods you could use to do the fold over applique but this one works for me so after I got all the circles ready and then I have my Dresden plates all ready to go and the background what I'm going to do now is start laying everything out and get a layout I like so I'll lay the backing out somewhere and start laying out all of my doilies and my dresden's and just try to get a really fun layout that I like and then I'll start sewing it all in place I think the sewing will probably take me a bit longer than everything else because I'm not that great at applique and I'm gonna have to go nice and slow to get everything nice and even and I haven't sewn over the doilies yet but I'm worried that it might be a little difficult and my presser foot might get stuck so I'll let you know if I get any tips and tricks for sewing that easily all right I'm gonna go start laying everything out all right so I finally have a layout for the quilt that I really like and now I'm going to start sewing it all together it's going to be pretty hard to keep everything on the quilt to get it um attached before sewing I'm going to use applique adhesive and different things like that to get it to stay in place while I applique everything on there's no way I'm going to be able to take this up to my pressing station as is and get it all set in place so what I'm going to do is stack the dresden's in order and keep a photo on hand to refer to for the organization I like and also to keep everything nice and straight because right now I just kind of have it in a laid out way that isn't keeping the Dresden in a straight row I'm going to fold the quilt in half in both directions and press it and then take the ends and fold them into that middle fold and press again to get an idea of where each Dresden should be placed and how to keep it nice and straight and even all right so I'm going to start getting these dresden's attached and I think I'm going to sew them on one at a time along with the doily that is corresponding to each one I think that will keep it a little more organized and easier for me all right so I have the first Dresden and the center of the Dresden the circle all attached to the background it is the first Dresden in the top row and I used some applique glue to attach it I didn't want to use any like fusible stabilizers or anything just because I didn't want that extra weight this is going to be a pretty weighty and bulky quilt after I get everything sewed on so I just figured this would be the best route I did set up my sewing machine for sewing this quilt I'll show you a few things that I did I put a smaller presser foot on here this is an eighth inch foot in that so that I can get really close to the edge here and go around I did raise my Stitch length and I'm going to put it about just under three on my machine and then I raised my presser foot some so that I'm not distorting the fabric and all these layers as I sew around so I'm going to get the Dresden sewed on first and then I'm going to attach on the doily on top of it that corresponds with this this plate now I'm just going to sew around here and try to stay right at the edge an eighth inch away from the edge and then do the same on the circle here so it's just going to be some slow sewing it'll probably take me a while to get all of these attached on so I'm going to leave my needle down when I get to the points and just pivot my Fabric and then sew along the other side I just am going to try to get right to an eighth of an inch the edge and then sew along it's kind of easier at these points because when I get the needle right at the seam that's where I'm going to stop and then pivot the points are a little bit higher so The Valleys to me are easier the points are a little harder to judge where I am in relation to the edge if I'm an eighth of an inch away but so it's just going to be a lot of sewing here now I'm just doing a straight Stitch you could always sew these in place with a fancier Stitch if you would like to um that's just kind of preference I feel like I'm using a cream thread and I'm doing that because that is going to match my doilies really well and I want the design on the doilies to stand out more than the thread color I'm using so since this is all on the top of the quilt I want the thread to match so I don't even have half of these done yet so like I said this is going to take a while all right so now I have the Dresden stitched in place and now I'm going to stitch the center circle in place this will serve two purposes one it'll secure the Dresden even more and then it will also attach the circle on I'm going to do this much the same way I'm just going to go slowly around this circle and try to keep as even about an eighth of an inch from The Edge as I can again I'm just doing a straight Stitch around the edge if you have a machine that does nice fancy stitches it might be fun to use a different Stitch if I start to see the fabric Bunch up because you know it's not really easy doing these tighter circles on a sewing machine I'll lift my foot my presser foot with the needle down so I can pivot a little bit and try to keep this nice and even slow and steady is honestly the best way with any applique now see how I'm wanting to turn a little bit and the foot is holding the fabric in place so you just have to raise the foot a little and shift it when you raise the foot make sure you're not still sewing and make sure your needle is down or you'll lose your position some of these are going to be completely covered by a doily so my stitches won't matter so much on them but you still need to get this secured in place and even though the doily is going to be on top of all this this is hiding all of that inner rough edges of the Dresden so I do still want to attach this circle even though a doily is going to be covering most of it visually all right so I have one finished on here I'm so excited that I'm getting some progress on this quilt now I'm going to grab the doily for this Square and get it lined up nice for that I don't think the glue or any of that will work I think I'm gonna have to pin that in place the best I can so hopefully I can get it to work really well alright so I have the doily pinned in place I just placed pins around the edge and when I get to them I'll be pulling those out as I go so my concern is with the presser foot that the the kind of toes if you will of the presser foot might get caught on the strings of the doily and because of the nature of the dolly doily you can also see that there are kind of Ruffles throughout the edge some of them are much flatter than others that I have but I need to make sure that I go very slow keeping an eye that I'm not getting hooked on any of the threads here and when I get to places where it's not laying flat I'm going to need to kind of add some pleats in here to to capture the edge of everything I'm going to try to stay right along as close to the edge of this as I can to keep it tacked down and when I go to quilt this quilt my plan is to follow the circles here to kind of hold more of the doily down so we'll see how that goes because again it is a concern when I'm quilting that I get stuck on some of these threads so this is definitely a quilt that you're going to have to have some patience for if you want to do one similar but I think the result in the end is going to be very very worth it also all right so I'm going to go along the edge here and hope that it works as as I'm hoping it does I'm keeping the Stitch length the same because I'm going to be adding a lot more stitching on here at some point as well um later and mainly right now I just want the edge to be down and in place so going along here I'm not this this foot thankfully curves up a tad at the the end here if you can see it so um I may not have as much concern as I thought I did with um with the foot getting caught in some of these threads but this seems to be working really well and I'm really happy with my thread color choice because it doesn't look like it's going to stand out a lot here and take away from the beautiful design of this doily the kind of pleating that I'm doing however is kind of taking away from the design there but hopefully the focus stays on the center and that shouldn't happen in too many areas there's just a few that there's a lot of spaces where it lays really flat and not all of my doilies that I found have as much ruffle as others especially the small ones those will work really well on this all right so the first Dresden is done on this junk Journal quilt and I am in love with how it looks so I'm going to move on to the next one and this is going to kind of be the same process throughout the whole quilt I'm going to fold this um this Edge down to the seam here the seam that is the background color I'm not folding down to any of the newsprint seams and that'll help me find the center of this section so I can press it and know where the center of the block there is so I can have a reference point to line up my Dresden for this next one so now I have a nice crease there I'm going to grab the next block on that pile I'm going to move the doily because where you're going to do that later and then what I'm what I do is just line up the circle of the Dresden so it kind of looks centered on my two crease lines for this block after I've done that I'm just going to go through the same process where I use my glue this is just some Acorn Precision piecing product so before I kind of flip this whole thing over I think I'm going to do it in sections this time because it kind of got a little messy and just get a few sections tack down and see if that works a little bit better this time because really if I get if you could spots tack down I think it should hold enough since I'm piecing it right away or not piecing it but since I'm stitching it right away I don't need it to hold on for a long period since I'm just working one at a time and if this all isn't perfectly lined up it's going to be better than when I was just eyeballing it and laying it out but if it's not all perfectly lined up that's honestly fine for the look I'm going for because this is supposed to be kind of a scrappy um Journal feel to it or scrapbook feel it's not supposed to be Perfection actually none of my quilts are supposed to be Perfection I just I like to have fun and I like to see the finished product and I like this to be a fun enjoyable process for me yeah if this is holding yes that was much better than having it flipped the other way get all the edges with glue and then try to flip it over and line it up without glue getting everywhere and put a little bit under here hopefully I have enough of this glue because this is gonna this is gonna take a minute this fabric is absolutely gorgeous for this whole idea and I think if you go to the quilting cats website when I was looking at it before she still has a few more of these kits so if you're loving it too go grab one before they are gone Perfect all right so I'm going to go sew this in place just as before right along the edge here then right along the circle and then I will use some pins to put this doily in the center and it actually kind of lines up almost perfectly with that Circle in the center so this inner beautiful flower almost lines up right there I wonder if I could save myself some time and ah no I'm not going to I want to make sure it's lined up nicely but I'm so excited about this quilt let me know in the comments what you think and how it is coming together all right so this quilt is almost finished I actually have it all basted together and even some quilting done on it I did some simple straight Stitch quilting down the seams here just to make sure it's nice and stabilized because this cooled is actually pretty heavy with all the uh dresden's and the doilies on it it weighs a lot and I wanted to make sure I got some quilting done to really help stabilize it before I add some more quilting so I'm going to get some more quilting added onto here but I did want to tell you something I discovered about the doilies I was working with I had a few places that I wanted to add some extra doilies but I didn't have quite enough to get the look that I wanted on this quilt so what I did was I cut one of my doilies up because it was a very very ruffled and I didn't think it would work really well tacking it down the way I'd hoped so I took off the outer edge of the doiling was able to have two blocks that look just like this on the quilt there's one there and then one down here at the opposite side so this one has that same outer part of the doily around it I don't recommend cutting doilies apart um the way they are hooked together they don't hold very well but I got a lot of stitches down where I brought the seam together and I do think it will hold pretty well but it isn't really ideal now there is the inner part of this doily still left and I'm hoping to add it to some accent pillows later so here is the inner part of that doily and you can see even though I snipped Away part of it it is still holding together you just don't want to pull it a lot until you get those stitches down to really help secure it again a few other tips I have for you when working with doilies if you remember when I was stitching this first doily on I was discussing a lot of the Ruffles around the edge something I discovered as I was working on all of these different blocks was that that you can iron the doilies and so I kind of played around with that a little bit and I got some of them pretty flat this one over here had a lot of Ruffles around the edge and it still had some after I ironed it but it really got it much flatter than it was before so I wish I had discovered that with the first one because I think this one turned out a lot better because of that extra ironing on them so if you decide to make a quilt like this keep that in mind I think it will really help you a lot especially if it is a doily that has been used a lot may be washed I ironed it and kind of stretched it out a little bit and that helped so much when working with the rest of the doilies on this project this was so much fun that I decided I am going to use some of my extra left over petals to make two accent pillows as well I had so much fun so stay tuned for next week's video where I share how to put together these accent pillows because if you are loving this look but don't want to take on such a large project that might be the perfect way to have fun making a quilt like this with doilies and the Dresden plate and not have to sew so many together all right so my junk Journal quilt is completely finished I am so excited about how it turned out I love it so just so you know quilting this isn't very easy with the doilies on here so I ended up having to change my plan a little bit and I just quilted along a few of the petals here to finish off the quilt I wasn't able to Free Motion quilt circles around it or anything like that it just kept getting stuck on the threads if you are more comfortable with free motion quilting it may work better for you doing it I am not that comfortable with it so I scrapped the idea and did something that worked for me and because there's so many interesting elements on this quilt I felt like it was fine not doing a lot of fancy quilting I just needed to make sure all the layers were nice and secure I went ahead and bound as well so it is completely finished and I am loving how it turned out I can't wait to get the accent pillows finished and I'll be sharing that video with you all next week thank you so much for watching and I'll see in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Sew Be It Quilts

Views: 11,579

Keywords: dresden plate quilt, dresden quilt tutorial, dresden quilt ideas, quilt patterns, dresden quilt block, quilting videos, dresden quilt block tutorial, dresden quilt patterns free, dresden quilt blocks reimagined, junk journal, dresden quilt designs, vintage junk journal, Dresden plate quilt pattern variations, scrappy quilts tutorials, scrappy quilt ideas, scrappy quilt patterns, scrappy dresden quilt, quilting tutorial, quilting tutorial on youtube, granny core

Id: RAz3SSm6Ets

Length: 39min 22sec (2362 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023