Soft & Spooky Quilt-Along: Weeks 2 and 3
Now for the next 5 weeks we'll be sewing blocks, so each week, we'll share some tips that can applied to all the blocks, so you feel supported no matter what speed you're sewing at. So, today, we're sharing tips for cutting fabrics, as well as fussy-cutting if you've made the choice to do that in your quilt.
1. You can save a little time when cutting fabrics for your blocks by layering your fabric to cut multiple pieces at once! If you do this, we suggest having a fresh rotary cutter blade. Lay out your fabrics on the cutting mat – three layers is usually a good number. Any more than that and you may get some shifting of the top layers of fabrics as you cut. If you're cutting a lot of pieces from just one fabric piece, you can fold it in half to speed up the process. Trim one side of the fabrics even with a line on your cutting mat to get a straight edge to start with, then cut as stated in the pattern.
2. Keep your fabrics organized! Because this quilt uses sets of matching fabrics to make each block, you want to keep those fabrics together. You can gather all the fabrics for each block, then add a pin or clip with the block labeled so you don't mix up the pieces. This makes it easy to grab what you need and take to your sewing machine when you're ready!
3. Lastly, let's talk about fussy-cutting. You can fussy-cut for the plus sign pieces, the dot center, or the center of the star block. See more about these two methods here.