Quilting 101: How to Cut Fabric

hi everyone and welcome back to my channel today we're continuing on with my quilting 101 series and we're going to talk about how to cut your fabric now I know it might seem like a simple thing but when I first started quilting I wasn't quite sure exactly how to go about doing that and what the best way was to get precise cuts and all that kind of thing now cutting your fabric is the first step in creating a good quilt because if you are not cutting straight or accurately and then you start sewing those pieces together and then you start sewing more pieces to that it's just going to slowly get more and more off and so I'm going to show you my tips there's a lot of ways to do this but I'm going to show you how I cut my fabric and hopefully some of these tips will help you so what you'll need for today is your rotary cutter and I'm just using the Olfa splash 45 millimeter rotary cutter and you'll also need some yardage to cut you'll also need your self-healing mat and a clear acrylic ruler so let's get started okay so for this tutorial what you're going to need is your self-healing cutting mat and then some kind of a rotary trimmer and then you're also going to need your clear acrylic ruler and the first thing I just want to say is safety wise is that I just get in the habit of every time I set down my rotary blade I just flick it shut and then set it down the main reason that I do that is because when you're sewing your table can get kind of crazy and messy and you don't want to be reaching or trying to find it and pick it up by the blade these are super sharp and you will easily cut your finger off if you were to grab it or if a kid were to come up and and touch it or anything like that so just safety precaution just get used to or get in the habit of closing your blade when you're not using it I don't even think about it anymore I trim close it and then just set it aside so that's just lesson number one so let's get out our fabric okay so I have some yardage here and I'm just going to talk about how to cut yardage because that's probably the most common question cutting the pre cuts is fairly simple and a lot of them are already like I said pre-cut for you so you might not need to cut it as much but I use these same cutting techniques no matter how big my piece of fabric is so here is your piece a piece of yardage this is normally about 42 42 43 inches with fabric and what that means is this is the salvage edge here and so from salvage this is folded in half all the way around back to the other salvage is usually about 40 to 43 inches kind of can depend on fabric so the first thing that I do is I fold my yardage in half it usually comes this way off the bolt just make sure my selvage lines are lined up and then there's a couple ways to cut I typically do not use the lines on my mat unless I'm cutting something that is wider than the ruler that I have on hand I think it's a little bit more accurate to go by the lines on my ruler so the first thing that I do is I line up my ruler and I'm lining up the edge down here with the fold of the fabric okay so hopefully you can see it a little bit better so here's one of the lines on my ruler doesn't really matter I just make sure that my ruler is coming over the edge of my fabric on this end and also on the salvage end but as you can see I line it up with a fold so I have some kind of a straight guide and then I usually just scoot it as close to this edge as possible just so that I can straighten this edge because if you get your fabric pretty cut from a store whatever they're not sometimes they're cutting of a scissors sometimes they tear it there's lots of different ways but it doesn't necessarily guarantee that they did a straight cut so I always just straighten up this edge so that I know that I'm working with a straight edge to start off with so let's go ahead and do that all right so once I have it lined up at the bottom and I just I make sure I have both layers on this edge so I'm going to catch them both and then I press nice and firm on the top of my ruler go ahead and open up your rotary trimmer start at this edge and then just slowly work your way up and if you have a long piece I will leave my blade lift my hand up press again so that it doesn't slide now these rulers do have a anti slip thing on the bottom but they can still move around so now you can see I have a nice clean mark there so if you have a shorter mat let's say and you still have yardage you can always fold it in half I still have my salvage edges together and then you can just fold up your other corner as well just making sure this is straight and then when you go to straighten it out you can line up your bottom ruler line with the fold again and still get a cut now my suggestion that is I don't like to cut more than four layers of fabric at one time I feel like four layers is good enough to give me still an accurate cut by four I mean one two three and four so I still feel like I get an accurate cut without many layers but anything more and I tend to feel like I've got slippage and shifting and that kind of thing and I don't feel like I get very straight cuts so I try not to go over the four layers of fabric now the other thing that I like to do since I'm right-handed I've got I had my ruler like this and I was cutting like this once I make that first cut if I can't help it I don't like to move the fabric around so I'm going to take the rest of my yardage and just kind of fold it up so it's out of the way and then I will actually turn my mat around like so and then that way I haven't even had to worry about moving my fabric and it's shifting around and that kind of thing now if you don't have enough room to do that you can move your fabric but just know that you you know your lines may your edge that was nice and straight might not be quite as lined up alright so now that our mat is turned around I can get this fabric out of the way again and grab my ruler and now here is my tip I know there's lots of different ways to do this but I like to have the piece that I'm going to be using in my quilt underneath the ruler so I don't care where it's placed on my mat I'm not using these lines but let's say I'm going to be cutting this for sashing so I need a two and a half inches a strip of sashing so if you're looking at the ruler this way hopefully you can see there are half-inch marks if you flip the ruler over then you've got regular inch marks and that just kind of helps it something good to know on these I like that because as long as I'm got it facing the right way it's a lot easier to line up my lines so I'm going to line mine up with the two and a half inches and since I'm cutting upside down from you here this is my two and a half inch mark and I'm going to put it right at the edge of my fabric hopefully you can see this on camera but as you can see these creative grid lines are nice and small so it's really good it's really easy to get a nice cut so then I'm going to be holding this down and cutting this and then all this would be fabric we're not using the reason that I like to do that is because I feel like I'm holding the fabric plus the ruler so when I make a cut if anything kind of shifts over here it doesn't really matter this is the piece that I care about so that's the piece I'm kind of holding down while I cut so we're going to go ahead and just trim that off so I'm opening my trimmer I'm holding nice and tight and I'm also being careful not to veer off the edge of my ruler I've got my blade just butted up right next to my ruler and I'm just going to make a cut okay and then you can move this piece if you are done and that's the only one you need or I will a lot of times just leave it there and I can see you probably can't see on camera but I can see where my line was so I'll just line up my two and a half line on the cut line and still on this edge down here and cut another piece of session and I'll just keep doing that going down the row here and it's easy for me to see it's also easy for me to cut so let's say I need six or so strips so I'm just going to again hold down the piece I'm cutting and well up alright then I'm going to close my rotary blade and set that aside now the only other thing I have to do to these pieces is because I flipped this up so I had cut you know that maximize my space here I need to just cut off the sashing and if I haven't moved them around then all I have to do is lay my ruler on there and cut off my sashing so let's go ahead or my um Salvage edge sorry so I'm going to just get these out of the way and normally I would turn my ruler again but since I'm kind of filming for you guys I'm going to try and cut sideways I will say that I don't feel like you get as good of a cut if you're you know trying to trim sideways or underneath your arm or whatever it's also not as safe typically you want to be cutting away from yourself I try not to cut towards my body just because it's not as safe and also I feel like I have a hard time getting a good but I'll usually they're off my ruler that way so I like to just spin my mat around as I'm cutting that way I'm not moving the fabric around but I'm still in a comfortable position for me to be cutting if you're left-handed this will all be opposite so I'm going to cut off just the selvage edge one thing I've learned is sometimes Salvage edges don't always line up perfectly on the bolt so you just want to flip it over and make sure that you're getting the salvage on both of your pieces before you cut otherwise you might end up cutting and then on the bottom side you'll have some white sticking out or something like that so we're going to go ahead and just trim all those off together and now our sashing is ready to go and to be sewed together and it was like easy-peasy now if I were to use these for se C I needed to inch blocks or these are two and a half so let's say we needed two and a half inch squares I would actually do it the same way cut a bunch of sashing strips depending on how many blocks I needed and then I would stack them up so again I only have four layers of fabric and I could do the same thing for these two strips as well just line them up like that and just make sure if I feel like I've moved stuff around a little bit or whatever again I'll take my ruler and just straighten up this edge before I start cutting and again I just use this edge to line it up so if I need to do that I will if I don't then I usually don't but again I would just line this up let's see I'm upside down on a ruler so I would just line this up with a two and a half and make a cut here and then as you can see some of these moved a little bit so if that happens you can scoot them down scoot it over cut another two and a half inches and keep going and that's the fast way to cut several squares at lunch because I just cut eight squares in one slice so I don't ever sit there and cut out one little square at a time that would take forever wherever I can if I had to do like a hundred of these I'd probably have you know more rows of sashing just in a line and just cut like a bunch of them at once and that way it's easy to knock out like 100 squares or something in just a couple minutes cutting several at a time again I would stick to the four-layer ruler but that rule but that's just me you can of course do whatever you want okay the next thing I'm going to talk about is how I would just cut out something for a pattern so this particular pattern is telling me that I need to cut 48 oh sorry 96 5 inch squares now I have some fat quarters here if you were cutting it by the yardage I would cut it by the width of fabric which would be from salvage edge to Salvage edge in five inch strips and then cut you know five inches sideways kind of like I just showed you with the little squares so the first thing that I'm going to do is I kind of iron this I didn't do a super great job it enough that I don't feel like I have huge creases and then I lined up my fat quarters I only have three but by their Salvage edge down here as best as I can so they're basically fairly straight now all your fat quarters are going to possibly be a little bit different in their cut so I'm still going to need an edge to line up with so the first edge that is going to be easiest for me to cut off is my Salvage edge so I'm going to go ahead and turn my mat um so that you can see this hopefully I'm going to place my ruler on here and I'm kind of just going to use my edge down here and also my salvage as a guide and I'm just going to make sure I'm getting the salvage off all three pieces which I am okay so again I'm going to put nice pressure on my thing so that my ruler so it doesn't slide around I'm going to open my blade and just cut a nice strip off the edge make sure everything comes off nice and clean now I'm actually going to turn my map around the other direction so I need five inch squares so I'm going to line up my five inch edge and I'm actually not going to worry about line cutting the other edges at this time I just needed a straight edge to start out with so I have my five inches on this side and then I know I double count one two three four five right count twice cut once and I can kind of move my extra fabric over the way over here as well so I'm going to go ahead and cut one strip you're cutting something that is like two and a half inches whatever I usually just get out my phone and on my calculator I say alright 18 inches divided by two and a half is what and see how many strips I can get cut out that's how many strips I know I have to cut out of my big chunk or I'll also do how many like 22 divide it by two and a half and see how many I can get out of if I cut it this way and then I'll just cut it the most economical way so I'm wasting the least amount of fabric since I'm doing five inch by five inch squares it kind of doesn't really matter which way I go here now I can see my line here if you can't you can scoot your fabric over just slightly but I'm just going to cut another five inch strip like this okay so and I'm going to continue doing that all the way down my fabric now for the purpose of this video I'm just going to move that out of the way I'm going to turn my board again to the side all right and then notice we never squared up this side so the first thing that I'm going to do is just kind of look and see if I have any super short pieces I'm going to line up my ruler with this edge right here and then just go as close as I can to this edge and since this isn't a very long cut I probably will cut toward myself that where sometimes I cut this way if you'll notice I slip a lot more going that way and my hand tends to cut this direction as well so this isn't really an ideal cutting situation probably what would be better were if I to come on this side line it up just make sure you have all three layers there I'm looking at this edge and at the bottom edge cut off a straight chunk and then flip my mat around that way I'm not moving my fabric any all right so I'm going to just line up along this edge and along this edge so I now have a nice straight since I'm cutting two strips of fabric with three layers each I'm going to hold my ruler down nice and tight and just start here and just carefully press up and then you can kind it at this point you can kind of move those out of the way so it's easier to see because you're not needing to trim off salvages or anything the only time I won't maybe pull them out of the way is if I am doing something like where I have to trim off a salvage and sometimes just if I'm going to use the whole piece I'll just trim off the salvage anyways and then there you go now the only time like I said I kind of like to keep my salvage on it sometimes because that way I can tell what the material is in case I need it again and sometimes I don't always remember what it's called or whatever so that's the only reason why I wouldn't cut my Salvage edge off first especially if I have a piece of fabric that I might be you know needing for background or board or binding or whatever I want to know what it's called so you can also trim it off first and then keep it so whatever whatever works easiest it really kind of depends on what you're needing to do but so that's just kind of a fast way to cut out of a lot of squares at once as you can see I just cut out like what is that 18 squares and you know it only took a couple seconds alright so one other tip I wanted to talk to you about is when I already said you know I like to have the piece I'm using under my ruler but what if I only have this ruler which is six and a half inches wide and I need a 10 by 10 square or something like that so in that instance I would use the lines on my cutting board and I'll usually try I've already lined up this edge I've already trimmed this edge when I was cutting my pieces just a second ago so what I'll want to do then is use one of these main inch Lyons inch markers and then count over ten and then put my ruler on so what we're going to do to do that is I'm just going to line up as best as I can this edge along with one of these inch lines hopefully you can see that and then over here I've got it poking over by about quarter of an inch off of one of those lines and that's because I haven't squared up this side yet so I'm going to go ahead and do that and I'm just going to put my ruler right along the lines on my cutting mat hopefully you can see those because they're white so I'm not sure if they're showing up on camera very well so I don't normally cut towards myself and I don't know if you could hear that but this is part of the reason why see I don't have as good of pressure doing that as well kind of the same deal going this way so it's just not really an ideal situation if you can flip your mat around and whatnot I do suggest that so now I know that I've got a straight line right along this inch marker on my board and I've got them lined up along this one so then what I'll do is count over one two three four five six seven eight nine ten inches and I will again line up my ruler on the mat so now I'm not worried so much about the numbers on my my trimmer or my ruler I'm worried about the numbers on my mat and again I'm in a cow because I have before put it on here and then still miscounted so that's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten okay so we're good so you count twice measure or cut ones okay measure twice cut once and now I can cut off this strip right here and know that I've got exactly ten inches even though my ruler wasn't you know large enough to accommodate that piece so that's really only the time that I use the lines on my mat is if it's something bigger than what I can handle with my ruler and then in this case I would probably turn my mat I'm just going to turn my fabric really quick realign it up on the edges and because this is more than ten and then count one two three four five six seven eight nine ten pop my ruler back on there and I'm lining it up against the lines on my mat again and one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so we're good and then I can just trim off that excess and then because I need five and five inch squares if you were to be using a layer cake or whatever it's really easy to get five inch squares out of the layer cake if that's all you have you can also of course buy a charm pack but sometimes I'm working on fat quarters sometimes I have layer cakes sometimes I have charm packs and a lot of times I'll just cut what I need from what I have so for example in this one it's really easy to get five inch squares I'm lining up my five inches just making those sure those are lined up and again now I'm going off my ruler and not my mat and I would cut it once that way which gives you five or five this way and if we were accurate in our cutting before we should be able to turn it cut this way and now we have four five inch chunks and again I have three fabrics here so as you can see they don't move around a whole lot when you're using three to four pieces of fabric all right I just want to show you one more thing and this is why I have one of these smaller rules again this is a creative grid rule or mainly because it has the no-slip and I also like the thin lines but a lot of times I'm cutting small pieces and I'm just using scraps that I might have have like a scrap of white since I use it so much a bag and I just can pull out little chunks and and whatnot and so if I were needing to cut like 1-inch squares or whatever I probably wouldn't want to be using my really big ruler because it's going to be hard it's gonna be hard to hold the ruler and all that so that's where this might come in handy now in order to do that I'll take my scraps and sometimes if I have some that are similar size I'll line them up you know a couple edges try and get them as close as I can on two edges and then I'll just line up my ruler here as you can hopefully see it's one and a half by one and a half and then I can just kind of quickly trim off those edges and bam like really fast I have one and a half inch squares you can also look at some of your other things like for example I've got these triangles I may want to use them for something else later but most the time I'm looking for squares and you can quickly see yes you've got enough space there to cut those off so you can just do that really quickly so this ruler is great for if you're doing smaller pieces or you're cutting up some of your scraps or whatever and it's a go you know it's just a little bit nicer to cut them using a smaller rule than it is using like your nice big like six and a half by 24 I still like that one the most because I can use it on the most sizes of fabrics but it is nice to have you know a little bit smaller one to work with if you're dealing with these little pieces and you'd be surprised how many quilt patterns call for little tiny pieces like this so hopefully that helps so one other thing I quickly wanted to show you about fabric and when you're trimming your fabric is that there is what's called a bias to your fabric and if you'll notice hopefully you can tell this on the video but if I were to stretch the fabric sideways I don't really get a whole lot of stretching I'm typically cutting along the grain of my fabric so I don't have to worry too about stretching and formation and that kind of thing however if you are to cut a diagonal piece from your fabric hopefully you can see this it stretches quite a bit more and so if you're ever to be cutting this way across your grain of your fabric you're going to end up having quite a bit of stretches stretching it can also distort the fabric to do that so I'm not telling you never to do that I'm just saying to be aware that if you're cutting on the bias of your fabric - just be careful sometimes it's helpful to iron and starch it first help keep it more stable and less apt to deform and - just be careful you know when you're doing that to know that pieces can get distorted and that kind of thing there's a lot of binding that people do cutting on the bias and it's definitely a common practice it's just something to be aware of when you're cutting if you were to say cut some I know a lot of patterns that not a lot but some of them I've looked at have you cut out a square first and then you would cut diagonally from edge to edge on the square so you would just want to be aware of that if you're doing that to just be really careful with those pieces and treat them kind of a little more delicately than you would something that's cut along the grain of fabric so that's just a tip there and then one more tip I have is if you hopefully you can see these crinkles on here this is just a fat quarter that I have just unwrapped and if you'll notice there are some pretty good creases in the fat quarter so my tip on that is - depending on how bad the creasing is I would probably iron my fat quarters before I would cut them or sew them because when you're cutting and if you were to cut along like this edge right here and you go to open it up you it can be a little bit distorted so that's just one other tip if you have a lot of crinkling in your fabric or or like if you're using a scrap or you know just stuff that's been folded from the bolt that has that nice really hardcore crease in it to try and iron those out first and I'll talk about ironing your fabric another video however just really quick tip either steam works really well like nice and hot I usually turn my iron on too high I use steam if that doesn't get it out just spray a little bit of water on it and then iron over it and I find that that actually helps get rid of those more stubborn creases really well so I would do that if I have a really you know a well creased piece of fabric before I cut it alright guys so those are my helpful tips for on how to cut your fabric I hope they help some of you now as I mentioned I'm doing fun giveaways for my videos and so for today's video fat corner shop is sponsoring a giveaway of my favorite trimmer as I mentioned in a previous my supplies video it's the Olfa 45 millimeter trimmer this is my very favourite one not only because it's a pretty color but also because I feel like I get really accurate cuts with this it's easy to use I don't have to press really hard and it's also really easy to open and close and it just really fits really nicely in my hand so anyways I'm going to give one of these to one of you so I'll put the link below to my blog and you just need to head over there and enter to win for today's price so I hope you enjoyed this video hope it helped you out and I will see you for the next one you

Channel: Erica Arndt

Views: 378,923

Keywords: Quilting, How To, Tutorial, Fabric, Quilting 101, Sewing

Id: Hk-aUGbsCxE

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016