Show Me How: Small Quilt

Download the pattern and follow along: www.allpeoplequilt.com/showmehowquilt.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Linda Augsburg, executive editor of American Patchwork and Quilting, and today on Show Me How brought to you by Baby Lock, I'm going to show you how to make this cute star quilt. If you want to sew along with us, download the instructions from AllPeopleQuilt.com/ShowMeHowQuilt. The great part about this quilt is that there's just one pieced unit, the star points unit, and then you sew together some squares with that and you've got this adorable quilt. To make it, I choose nine different fabrics for the stars, and nine different fabrics for the background. This is a great use for 10" precut squares or 2-1/2" precut strips. But in this case, I just used my favorite fabrics. What you'll need to cut then is a 2-1/2" square of each of your star fabrics, eight 1-1/2" squares of each of your star fabrics and eight 2-1/2" squares of each of your background fabrics. In addition, you'll want to choose a border fabric and cut two 2" strips across the width of the fabric for your borders, and then for the binding cut three 2-1/2" strips across the width of the fabric. Of course, you'll need batting and backing, and then you're ready to go. So the first thing you're going to do is mark the diagonal line on your smaller 1-1/2" blocks, so I'm using a chalk pencil, but you can use a regular pencil. But I just find on the darker fabrics a chalk pencil in this bright contrast pink really shows up for me. You're going to mark all eight of the squares in the same way. So you can see I've got my 2-1/2" squares of the background fabric and my 1-1/2" squares of the star fabric and I'm going to show you, you just want to position that in the corner. And watch the placement of that line that you've made. You want to make sure it's going in the direction shown. And you want to make sure you've got your lines pretty well, your edges pretty well lined up there, and I just put one pin in to hold it in place, and we're going to sew along that marked line. So you're just going to sew across that line, taking out the pin before you get to it, of course. And you can feed these in multiples at a time, so I can feed in the next one if I want to, and sew across those same lines just using your regular stitch. So you can see I've chain pieced all four of my small squares onto my larger squares and I'm just going to fold back then, flip that triangle back and you'll see I'm not cutting yet so I'm just going to press that with my fingers then I can trim these two off at a 1/4" here. So you can see now I've trimmed that seam allowance and I've pressed it open, and now I'm going to put the second marked 1-1/2" square on top of our background square and just put a pin in there to hold it. You want to make sure you've got the orientation of that diagonal line right because what you're going to end up with is another flip on this side the same as this one. We're going to sew on that marked line, remembering not to sew over your pins as you go. Cut the thread, and just like before now that we've got our second square, we're going to fold that back and fold back our other pieces, and I'm going to press this down and trim this seam allowance, as well, at 1/4". Alright, so we've got our star point unit pieced and I've trimmed them up to make sure they are 2-1/2" square. Then I'm going to lay them out, so I've got my four background squares in the corners, I've got my one star square in the center and I've got my four star point units facing that center square. I'm going to sew the rows together, three different rows, and I'm going to press those seam allowances toward the solid squares. So I've sewn the middle row to the bottom row, and now I'm going to sew the top row onto the middle row. To get the best results I want to kind of wiggle these two seams together so they're nice and nested together and then pin the one that's going to be the one that I'm coming toward so that it stays in place. And again on this side I'm going to do the same thing, making sure those two seam allowances nestle. And that's going to help me keep my corners where they meet, nice and square. So I've sewn all the blocks together I've pressed the seams in these rows, in this outside and this outside row, down and the pressed the seams in the inner row up facing up and that just lets me nestle these seams, the seams allowances as we go. Next, we're going to put on our borders. We've cut the borders at two strips 2x18-1/2" and two strips 2x21-1/2". Now I did measure my piece to makes sure this was right before I cut it. Even when we give you those border cutting instructions, it's always a good idea to make sure they fit your quilt. So we're going to sew on that border at 1/4" seam allowance, and I did pin at every seam allowance so that I can keep those seams going the direction I want them. It'll help keep everything a little more flat. So you can see we've got the borders on. Now you just need to quilt it with your batting and your backing, and then bind it with your 2-1/2" binding and you're ready to go. Thanks so much for joining us on Show Me How brought, to you by Baby Lock.