Attach the Raw Edges of Your Log Cabin Quilt

Video Transcript

"JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White for Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts located in Salt Lake City, Utah in Sugarhouse. And today, we're doing paper piecing log cabin. You can see here we have added our center block right here and our first two strips of light, which are on this side of our diagonal line. Now, we're moving in a counterclockwise direction and I'm getting ready to add my first dark strip. So I'm going to put, just as I did before, row edges together. I'm going to pin from the inside out, and the reason we do this is that when I flip this over and I sew, I can't see the pins and I can't remove them nor do I really want to. So if I pin this way, it does two things. It tells me where to stitch and it also has the points of the pins out of the way so that I don't get a broken needle. Now, I'm going to go to my machine. I'm going to back up a quarter of an inch behind where I'm supposed to be. My target for stitching is right here, but I'm going to start a quarter of an inch behind here and that's consistent every single time, because we lose a few stitches when we pull this paper off. And I'm going to stitch right along the line and then go a quarter of an inch over. Now, I'm going to lift this up, cut my threads free, flip that over, remove the pins. And this seam allowance, I don't really need to trim, but if I did, I would be picking it up like so, laying it down on my board, taking my ruler, lining a quarter-inch line-up on my seam line and cutting away the excess. Now, we're going to press this and you can see this is really beginning to turn into a log cabin. So if you'll just continue to do this in the same fashion, you can see that this is going to end up looking very much like this block because we've started here and then we did the next one which was C, D, E, F and so on. You can do it in a numbering system if that's more convenient for you. In our next segment, we're going to cut the outside edge, trim away our paper, and we've got our wonderful finished log cabin."