Make Quilt as You Go Blocks

in today's video I'm going to show you how to create an improvisational quilt as you go block and how to use the decorative stitches on your sewing machine to accentuate it Hi, I'm Kim Jamieson-Hirst. I'm an online educator and the host of The Quilter's Way. It's the only online quilting membership that combines learning and socializing. Now before we get into today's video, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you'll be notified the next time I have a new video. Let's get right to it. So you're going to need just a few things for this quilt as you go project. You're going to need a base a background and for that you're going to be using batting. So I have a square of batting here it's nine and a half inches square you can use whatever size you'd like because typically when you're doing quilt as you go you're joining blocks together. So let's consider this my first block and you're going to need some fabric of course. So just grab some of your favorite fabric scraps we're going to be trimming as we go along. So you're going to need a pair of scissors or you can use your rotary cutter and mat but scissors will work just fine for this project. You're going to need either an iron or if you have a seam roller like I do, I have a Violetcraft seam roller and it works really well and I can use it at my sewing machine without having to get up and go to my iron. So those are the things you're going to need to start off. Now, the first thing you're going to do with this, and this is an improvisational technique, but the first thing you need to do is to get a piece of fabric. Go figure, right? So I've got this piece of fabric I want to use this in the center. I'm actually gonna put like this so it's the center of my piece, it's my starting piece I should say. It doesn't have to be in the center of the block, you can put it wherever you want, but I'm going to put it center-ish on my block. So, that piece of fabric is going to be right side up and then the next piece of fabric that you're going to put down is going to be actually next to it, so you can put wherever you want to start is fine: I'm starting on the right hand side of this piece here and I want to take this piece of fabric and I want to put it right side down. Now this is a batik so it doesn't really matter whether it's right side up or down which is kind of nice. The thing you want to make sure is that it overlaps that bottom piece at the top and at the bottom. Alright, so then the next thing you want to do is you want to stitch this on with a 1/4" seam Now for what I'm doing today I actually have a 12 weight thread in my Janome MC 9450 and I'm getting a bit lazy today because I'm going to be using that thread not just for the decorative stitches I want to put on these pieces but also for the piecing and it actually works just fine. Typically you would have your regular piecing thread in and then if you wanted a heavier thread or a different color thread , you'd have to change out your thread but like I said I'm getting a little bit lazy here I wanted to see if I could do it all in one and it works just fine. So the white thread I'm using, you can choose whatever color you want, but the white thread I'm using is going to show up really well on these fabrics. So, to stitch this on with a ¼" seam, I actually have my F foot in there, again that's because that's the foot I want to use when I'm doing those decorative stitches. It's the foot I pretty much need to do those decorative stitches on this machine so I'm using it for piecing. So what I want to do on my, machine, I'm going into my quilting stitches and I'm going to choose Q2, quilting stitch 2, which is the ¼" seam. The nice thing about this technique is that you don't have to be perfectly accurate with your 1/4" seams. It's a good time to practice but if you're not perfectly accurate doesn't matter at all. so let's get stitching first let's get these pieces of fabric together so I can show you what to do next so my top piece is a little longer than the bottom piece so I just need to make sure that I stitch just enough to get off that bottom piece so they're all stitched together all right so here is my piece stitched on there so it worked just fine to get that on and so now what you'll do is open this up alright and you'll want to press it so I'm gonna use my seam roller here just to get it over there to lie nice and flat and then you can see that it's a little bit longer and a little bit more on the top that's fine perfectly fine I want to be that way rather than too short so I'm just gonna trim this down these do not have to be perfect cuts at all as a matter of fact I've got a couple threads in there so that's not a big deal I'm just going to cut it this way the very forgiving technique as you can see I also want to cut the bottom as well okay so I'm going to just trim that again on the similar angle to that bottom piece of thread bottom piece of fabric I mean not thread okay so there we go so now is the time when we can add some decorative stitches here when you can do some more quilting now typically what you do with quilt is you go blocks are you would just use a straight stitch so you just still have your piecing stitch set up and you could just stitch along there that's what most people do and that keeps it easy but I never like to do anything easy so I'm going to use some of the decorative stitches on my Janome m/c 9450 to add some extra interest to this project now even if you don't have a Janome MC 9450 and why don't you because they're such great machines but if you have a different sewing machine you may not have a lot of decorative stitches on it but you will have utility stitches so those are ones you'll use on knit fabric or you'll do it to finish off the edge of a seam even blind hemming stitches I'm sure your sewing machine has those stitches on it and you know what those stitches look really great in this application so I'm actually gonna use those on my Janome MC 9450 to show you how they look now let me explain another thing here before I start the typical orientation of these stitches when you add them to these pieces is that they will be at the same orientation as a seam so parallel to the scene they don't have to be exactly parallel but they'll go in this case let's say north so rather than east-west and there's a reason why you would do that and this is the reason why because if I am stitching from here I'll start slightly off my fabric and Stitch down and be slightly off at the end as well I am going to cover all of that piece of fabric with those stitches so if when I go I should say to add the next piece of fabric on I know that those stitches are going to be right on the whole fabric and go on and off on either side if I stitch them in this direction and I didn't start that stitch exactly at that seam I manned up the gap so I may have a stitch that's right the seam going along the next one maybe down an eighth of an inch or quarter of an inch and it's gonna look kind of strange so this is the reason why you tend to run them the same orientation as that seam okay all right so now the fun really begins let's add some decorative stitches and like I said I'm gonna use some utility stitches on this Janome machine so I've already got that thicker 12 weight thread in there which is going to work great for these stitches I just need to pick the ones I want to use so I am actually going to go into my utility stitches on this machine I was in my quilting stitch cute too now I'm going back to my regular utility stitches or use stitches on this machine and I'm going to start with you 18 okay now not being a garment sore I'm not sure the application for some of these I'm sure I can look them up but it just looks nice to me so I'm gonna start with that I'm actually going to start with my base fabric here now one more thing before you start is I've got this fabric it's this shape right now if I wanted to because it's not laid down on the one side really well it's not lay down these sides but the seams are catching it I could change the angle of this particular edge if I want it to so keep that in mind anytime you put a piece down you could always cut a different angle on the edge that's not yet stitched down on those pieces of fabric in this case I'm just gonna leave it it's just fine but let's go have some fun with this stitch so again using u18 and I'm going to actually flip it around the other way because I'm going to use my seam here to help set up the stitch so what I want to do is I'm just eyeballing this again this is an improv Pease just have fun with it it doesn't have to be any kind of perfect at all as a matter of fact the less perfect it is the better it's going to look in the end but I am using the edge of my foot to line up parallel with that seam and I'm just going to kind of eyeball it as I go along and try and keep that there alright there's our first stitch so that looks quite pretty doesn't it for a utility stitch that's really quite nice and I've locked my stitches they lock at the beginning and I've locked it at the end you probably don't need to do that cuz you're gonna have another piece of fabric running across it but better safe than sorry alright so I've got that one on here and you can choose how much coltan you want to do on the background piece if you just want to put one decorative stitch that's wider down the center and leave it at that that's fine but just try and be consistent at what you're doing in the other block so for example or the other pieces of fabric I should say if you had you know three or four really close dense quilting here and you only did one on this one and one on the rest might look a little weird so try and keep that in mind get the similar density of quilting on the different pieces of fabric ok let's try another stitch let's try 14 so utility stitch 14 I'm just going to move it over here oh and by the way again I'm running the edge of my foot parallel to that previously stitched okay so that's what that looks like by the way I'm not stitching it parallel well I am stitching apparel Aseem I was wanting to say I'm stitching it parallel to the previous line of stitching a lot of stitching words and this isn't there okay so I've got that one I'm gonna finish off with the same stitch I used at the beginning you 18 and I'm just gonna move it over here somewhere and that's gonna be all I'm going to do right now on this particular piece of fabric okay all right so that's what we've got there so then I have this piece and you can turn around whatever way you want it's not a big deal but I need to get this down before I can continue on of course now I mentioned that you could change the angle and you can also change your mind I wasn't going to cut this but I am going to now because let's make it a little bit more interesting again does not have to be perfect and if you are using a rotary cutter rather than scissors and this application scissors are actually safer I would say because when you go to use your rotary cutter you're gonna have to fold that background back before you do it because if you don't well you're starting another new block that aren't you okay so on this guy I'm gonna try something a little different what am I going to use I am going to actually go into some of the zigzag stitches so there's a utility stitch eight everybody's got a zig-zag stitch on their machine right and I'm gonna do that one and while I use the defaults on these stitches I am actually gonna change my zigzag a bit I'm moving it up a bit so I want it to be wider I'm gonna go to 6.5 I want to be longer I'm gonna go to a mmm let's see how about 2.5 in my length choose whatever you want but you know you might as well have some fun with these stitches and see what they look like when you change the settings so let's see what this guy looks like again using that seem to help guide me along a little bit and I'm just going to put one stitch down the middle of this one okay so that wider zigzag first off covers more territory and secondly stitches a lot faster hate so I'm just gonna leave that like that so the next thing you want to do is add another piece of fabric so we are going around in a circular motion here okay so just gonna keep doing that and adding more pieces of fabric to it I've got another piece of fabric here that I want to use and let's see this one's not going to be long enough to use in that area oh dear what can I do well I can do a couple things pick another piece of fabric is the obvious answer the other thing you can do is you could take this piece of fabric stitch another one to it let's say this one for example you cut these so you can stitch them together with straight edges of course and then that would be long enough to cover so if you don't have a long enough piece of fabric you can always stitch another one to it and then use that in that particular area so let's see if I've got a longer piece of fabric I think I should have a longer piece somewhere here here let's say this guy that's definitely longer so what I want to do is line this up I want to make sure and I can put whether whatever angle I want as long as I make sure there's gonna be fabric showing underneath here if you will at this point in time fabric that extends past the edge of this piece of fabric because if it doesn't let's say I went up on this kind of an angle and I sewed it long I'm not covering the fabric and when I turn it over you got background showing not an attractive thing to see so just make sure you have your angles right it's a little bit of thinking this is really the only thing you have to think about again you want that fabric to extend out past the edge of your piece of fabric that's underneath on both sides I can move this back a little bit more okay now because I'm using the same thread and further I should say for the decorative stitches and for the piecing I need to make sure I go back to my piecing setting on my machine otherwise I'm going to be piecing this with a zig-zag stitch because that's the last one I used not what I want to do back I go into my quilting menu and I'm going to go with my cue to stitch again and I'm just going to cut off this excess here I've got lots of fabric I don't need this much so I'm just gonna cut that off for now and we're gonna stitch this on too so I'll just do one more these to show you and I can always tell if I'm in the right area because my needle has moved back over to that quarter inch so we'll stitch this again so you might wonder why I am just stitching on the batting why am I not stitching on a quilt sandwich and then join it all together well you could do that but one of the reasons I don't do that is because of how it looks on the back of the batting or if you had a piece of fabric underneath it was like a traditional sandwich how would look on the back of that backing hard to see probably here because they're kind of white on white but as you sew along here you have these stitches so they go around and add more to it add more pieces to it you can see for example here is my stitching line for the piece I just added on and you can see how it crosses these lines I've stitched these out you know a little further and then this one comes on and I'm going to be having more lines of stitching you're gonna start seeing these stitching lines over overlapping one another and it gets to be this kind of grid it can look a little messy if it looks messy on the back of the batting it doesn't really matter because you're not gonna see that because it's gonna be covered by a backing but if you had your backing on there already you're gonna see that in the back of it whether it bothers you or not you know I don't know but for me I find that it's a little bit messy and it's probably better if I don't have the backing on at this point in time and when I put the backing on it's going to be pristine I can stitch in the ditch between these or add any other quilting if I want but it's gonna look a lot better it's a vanity thing okay so I'm going to put this back roll it back get that little seam roller in there I have this extra bit of fabric sticking out here I was cutting off some of it it doesn't really matter it's gonna be covered so not to worry about that okay and so then I've got this one to do some quilting on you're also going to notice that there's a difference here on this angle okay I can't do much with this angle it's already down here so I've got this weird kind of thing went on which means I'm gonna have to have the next piece of fabric to do some extra covering here okay it's gonna have to do a lot of covering there okay probably not something that you would do intentionally so be mindful of the angles on these different projects when you go and cut them off okay so for example I cut that on that angle that was probably not a good choice okay it's better to actually open up your piece and then do your trimming okay whether I had enough fabric to trim it that way I'm not sure but anyway it's probably better to do that so while it is tempting to trim it like I did well it's still down the better choice is to open it up press it and then cut it on the same angle because it's much easier to see at that time it's not a huge problem but it's better if you do it that way okay so let's see what I can add here I'm just gonna add a few more stitches to this again I'm gonna go into those utility stitches and I am going to use let's see how about stitch 19 so you 19 on the Janome MC 9450 let's go in here I'm gonna move this guy over I only want to add a couple of stitches to this but again using that seam line as a guide and doing it in the same orientation the stitches gonna be the same orientation as the seam line is okay so that's an interesting one actually - it looks very nice I'm just gonna run that one again over here keep it down all right so we've got two lines of stitching there so that's what I'm going to continue doing as I go around this particular block just gonna keep adding more pieces again I'm kind of going in this direction so I'm gonna keep going one thing you want to keep in mind when you're doing these kind of blocks is when you get out towards the edges you want to make sure that you leave yourself a good space there to put a larger piece of fabric so you don't want to have a little tiny you know I don't want to have your fabric out to here and then you have a little itsy bitsy piece of fabric on the corner because remember you're trimming this block down this is a nine and a half inch block we're gonna be probably trimming it down a little bit maybe or in any case you're going to be using seams right you're going to have your quarter inch taken out in either side if you have a little tiny piece of fabric in this corner or nida corners you're gonna lose it in the seam allowance so make sure that you you know keep your stitching the fabrics that you're stitching down kind of within this area if you will and then they use bigger pieces out to the edges here just so you don't lose him in the seam allowance so I'm going to add more pieces here and do some more decorative stitching on this and show you what it looks like when I'm finished at all okay so here is the finished block so I've got all these different stitches on here these are all utility stitches some I've adjusted the length of it or the width on them but they're all just utility stitches that you will probably have on your machine if you don't have a Janome MC 9450 if you do I'll put a link well not a link but I'll put information in the description below about the different stitches that I used now this doesn't look very square right now of course because I have to trim it up so let me just show you what the back looks like so you can see all these stitches that go all over the place here so while I don't mind seeing these on the batting I don't think I'd like seeing on the backing so again what I mentioned before was the fact that I just use this on the back batting right now and that I'll be putting up backing on later on so the next thing I need to do is to trim this all up to the nine and a half inch block and then it'll be ready to add to other blocks and create a quilt so if you liked today's video I hope you'll give it a thumbs up share it with your quilting friends and remember to subscribe and hit the bell so you'll be notified the next time I have a new video

Channel: Chatterbox Quilts

Views: 101,354

Rating: 4.8804531 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilts, quilt, Chatterbox Quilts, Kim Jamieson-Hirst, how to quilt, tutorial, QAYG, quilt as you go, improvisational quilting, Janome MC9450, Janome 9450, decorative machine stitches, utility stitches, utility machine stitches, Janome sewing machine, how to quilt as you go, how to qayg, how to quilt as you go blocks, how to quilt as you go on Janome 9450, quilting as you go, quilting tutorial, quilting tutorials on youtube

Id: m3lldNDwDck

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019