Cutting Quilt Material Into Squares

Video Transcript

"Okay now you have your material washed and dried and ironed and you're ready to get your supplies together. First you'll need your sewing machine, pins for pinning the material, scissors for cutting it out. You'll need; it doesn't have to be a ruler, but something with a straight edge on it for when we get to making patterns on them. A seam ripper is always handy but not a definite and a pencil or something to mark on the material would be good also. And to cut these into squares what I do is I just kind of guess about how wide I want it to be and if you've seen any of the other videos that I have out there, I don't like cutting material much so I tend to rip it. So what I'll do is just go ahead and decide how wide I want it and I'll rip it like that. Now you're going to need four squares of each pattern and then for the background pattern, you will need an additional four squares and the center you can do whatever fabric you want. So you can either do it with one of the fabrics you already have or a different one. So you want to get four of each one and what I do to make sure I have squares is back what they taught us in school. To cut a perfect square, you cut it or you set it like that so one edge is straight on the other and make sure that you cut in far enough that it will rip and I just do that for every single square that I need to do. It's one of the biggest benefits to using just straight cotton is that it rips great. So just go ahead and do that and make sure that you get four of each of the patterns with an additional four for the background and a center piece."