How to Trim Your Velum for Your Log Cabin Quilt

Video Transcript

"JEANETTE WHITE: Okay. I'm Jeanette White for Expert Village and Piper's Quilt & Comforts. And today, we are doing paper piece log cabin. Now, we have stitched our pieces down to our velum foundation piece and we are getting ready to trim this. I'm going to pick up my seam allowance. I'm going to fold back the paper, take my ruler, line up a quarter of an inch on my seam line and then trim off my excess. Next step is I'm going to press this. Now, if you were making a quilt doing this, you'll be doing this assembly line so you might have 40 or 50 or a hundred of these and I'm going to press this down. Now, I'm ready to add my next strip. Now, this was A. This was B and here is C, and it is also light so I'm going to pick up my next strip, lay right sides together, line up my row edges. And when you're cutting these strips, as long as you've got at least a half-inch extra, that's all you need to worry about. If you end up having three quarters of an inch or even an inch extra, when I cut these strips you don't have to be nearly as accurate about it as if you were doing it the traditional way. Now, I'm going to stitch along this line right here. It's between B and C, and I'm going to start about a quarter of an inch behind where I actually want to be. And the reason we do that is that when I tear this paper away, sometimes the first few stitches come undone, so we're giving a little leeway in case we lose a few stitches. But it's still is going to be okay that it won't cut in to a seam line that's important. All right, now, we're going to pick up the seam allowance, and sometimes, this is stitched down right here underneath so we have to pull that free from the paper for just a little bit. I'm going to fold this back. I'm going to line up my ruler on the seam line just the way I did before. Trim off my seam allowance. Now, I'll press this down and you can see I've got the first two light ones. Now, we are travelling here. We have A, B, C and here will be D, and it will be a dark one. So on the next segment, we'll add our two dark strips and then you can see how this is really beginning to turn in to a full-pledge log cabin block."