How to Cut Pieces & Patches for a Quilt

Video Transcript

"JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White on behalf of Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts is located in Salt Lake City, Sugarhouse. Today, we are going to be putting together our 16-patch. We've cut our strips and we've seamed them all together, and we've pressed all our seam allowances toward the darker of these two fabrics. And we're ready to cut this apart and put it back together. Our original cuts for these strips were 2-1/2 inches, and we're going to stick with that increment all the way through. So what I'm going to do is pick a line, any line on my ruler, and line it up over this vertical line of this seam. And it's lining up here, here and here, and it's really nice if you can get these two outside ones as well. And then I'm going to do my first cut, which is called my true cut. Now, I'm going to be cutting in 2-1/2 inch increments, so we have one, two and here is the half right here. And I'm going to turn my board because this is a little bit awkward, and when you've got awkward cutting that's when it gets really dangerous. And I'm going to cut four of these strips. So here is one, two, three and four. When you're doing this cutting, be sure and take your time. And there's an old saying that says measure twice, cut once, and this is very, very true. Now, we're going to be stitching this together in this configuration and you can see this is kind of an illusion because it really looks like you've taken all these little squares and sewn them all together when, in fact, you did it in strips. Now, we're going to put right sides together, and because we have sewn our seam allowances together, we need to control the bulk. We need one seam allowance going one direction and other seam allowance going the other direction. And you can see here, I think, it's probably better from this angle that this one's going this way and this one's going this way, and we need to stitch it that way. So we're going to get pins. And there are some new pins out; I'm quite nuts about. They're really super fine so you can sew over them. We carry them here at the store and they are wonderful. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this row edges together, but this is overlapped too much. What I really want is to have this seam be uninterrupted, and you can see this one's overlapped too much. And so I'm going to now fold this back, and it helps to get a little traction in your fingers, and I'm going to slide this. And as I slide it, I can feel it. It just locks. The minute that happens, you're going to put a seam--or a pin, excuse me, just to the left of this seam line right here. See the seam line right here? My pin is just to the left, and that's controlling bulk and it's holding this seam allowance down. So we're going to do that all the way across, and you're only going to pin where you have got a seam line that is interlocking with the one that is below it. So these are locked together right here with just a pin. Now, I'm going to go to my machine."