Blockbusters: Quilting for beginners. Block 1.

1. Hello and Introduction: Mm. Have you ever wanted to learn patchwork and quilting, but weren't sure where to start? In this first class, I'll guide you through the essential skills every quilter needs from choosing your fabric and cutting accurately to sewing a consistent quarter inch seam and assembling your first block. This class is the first in my blockbuster series where we will build your skills one block at a time. As we progress through future classes, you'll create a collection of beautiful blocks that can eventually be brought together into a quilt that is uniquely yours. But for today, let's focus on making your very first quilt block. So hi everyone. I'm Joe from So Jo and welcome to your first Blockbusters class. I'm joining you today from my studio, My Happy Place, which I opened as a creative space to share my love of quilting and creative textiles. I've always enjoyed working across a range of textile and creative mediums, but quilting is my true passion. What began as a hobby years ago has grown into something much bigger and over time, I found myself wanting to share the skills and enjoyment that quilting brings. One of my favorite things is seeing someone discover that quilting isn't nearly as complicated as they may think, and I love to watch their confidence grow in every stitch. I created blockbusters because I wanted to make quilting accessible, enjoyable, and achievable for everyone. So whether you're completely new to quilting or simply want to build strong foundations, this series is designed to help you learn one block at a time, building your skills and confidence as you go. This class is the first step in that journey, and I'm delighted you've decided to join me, so let's get started. 2. Class Project: So by the end of today, you will have completed your first quilt block. I'll guide you through the simple steps of cutting and piecing your fabric together to create this block. This is just your starting point on simple block that can become part of something much, much bigger as you develop your quilting skills. You can find this pattern with the measurements in the resources section. 3. Materials and Equipment: So don't worry. You really don't need a whole sewing room full of equipment to get started. These are the basic tools and materials that I'll be using through the class. And if you've already have some of them brilliant, but if not, don't rush out and buy everything just yet. I'd like to explain first exactly what each item is for as we go. And please no need for notes. Everything you need to get started is in the resources section. So our sewing machine, a basic sew machine is absolutely perfect for this class. You don't need anything fancy. As long as it can sew a straight stitch, you're good to go. We will need to be using a quarter inch presser foot for our piecing without getting too technical at this stage, and please don't worry. I'm going to walk you through all of this. We need to obtain accurate and consistent seams, and this will result in an accurate, consistent block. Most patchwork and pieced seams are sewn with a quarter inch seam allowance, and the quarter inch foot has a guide that helps us to keep the edges of the fabric at exactly a quarter inch as you sew. Our cutting mat needs to be a self healing cutting mat. For this and my subsequent classes, I would recommend an A two size. This mat will protect your surfaces and indeed your cutting blade. A rotary cutter makes cutting fabric quick, easy, and most importantly, accurate. By yourself some spare blades too. I carry both 45 mil or 28 mil cutters depending on how detailed my project may be. But for this class, either would work. Remember, these are extremely sharp, so take great care when using and always store them with the safety guard on when not in use. The quilting ruler, this is your best friend when it comes to accurate cutting. I will walk you through how we read the measurements and use the markings so that we can cut with confidence and precision. With thread, I would always recommend to use a high quality thread. Personally, I choose Orophl threads. But for starting out, you can start with basic stuff, and you'll need a couple of spools of basic 50 weight cotton thread. Stick with neutral colors like white, cream or ud. For a scissors, you'll just need one pair, a pair of sharp fabric scissors for trimming, fabric and cutting threads. A pair of small thread snips are also handy but not essential. Pressing is a really important part of quilting. We will be pressing our seams as we go, which helps everything lie flat and keeps the components of our blocks neat and accurate, particularly important when we come to join our blocks together. So you'll need a good iron, a steam iron, that is, and a pressing mat or an ironing board. Fabric, of course, we're going to need fabric. I'll guide you on what types of fabric will work best for this project in the next section. All I will say is have fun, choose fabrics you love. 4. Choosing Fabric: So for this class and the rest of the series, I'm going to keep things really simple and stick with 100% cotton quilting fabric. It's easy to handle. It cuts accurately, and it's very forgiving when you're learning. So when choosing your fabrics, the choice out there is enormous. Solids, prints, bold patterns, detailed prints, stripes, florals, and goodness knows how many different colors and designs. But for now, choose cottons in a style that you love. You may want to buy a little selection for your project. In which case, I would suggest looking at fat quarter bundles, which is a great and easy way to get a selection of coordinating fabrics. Or, indeed, you may have a couple of old cotton shirts you can upcycle. Both are absolutely fine. It can also be helpful to think about who or what you're making your project for. Are you making a cushion for a particular room in your house? Is there a color scheme you'd like to work with? Or perhaps you're making something as a gift, maybe a new baby or a special occasion. Having something like that in mind can be a really good starting point when you're choosing your fabrics. Today, for our first block, I've chosen two contrasting fabrics. You can choose to use four, if you wish, but for demonstration purposes, I'll keep things pretty basic. So just for now, avoid directional fabrics such as stripes or fabrics that have an obvious kind of this way up. It's just another thing to think about, and we will be diving into this along the line. 5. Cutting and Measuring: Now that we've chosen our fabric, it's time to start cutting. Accurate cutting is one of the foundations of patchwork and quilting, and the more accurately we cut pieces, the easier they will be to sew together later. Don't worry if using a quilting ruler and a rotary cutter feels a little unfamiliar. At first, it really does get easier with practice. And in this lesson, I'm going to show you the basic techniques you'll need to get started. So let's get to know our quilting ruler. Your quilting ruler is designed to help you measure and cut accurately. It has lots of lines, numbers, and markings on it, which can look a little overwhelming at first, but you don't need to worry about all of them just yet. The most important thing is to understand how to use the measurements and grid lines to line up our fabric accurately. Quilting rulers come in all sizes, but to get you started and get you ready for most future quilting projects, I would recommend a six inch square ruler, a 9.5 inch square ruler, and a long six by 24 inch ruler. These are great for when we come to squaring up our quilt tops later on and for cutting longer lengths of fabric. Before we start cutting our pieces, we need to make sure we have a nice straight edge to work from. Fabric isn't always perfectly straight when we first take it out, so we begin by trimming away a small amount to create a clean, straight edge. Give your fabric a very gentle press first, to give yourself a nice flat surface. This will give us an accurate starting point for everything we cut afterwards. I just want to quickly mention the selvage. This here is the selvage. It's a finished edge, and it runs along both sides of the fabric. You'll often recognize it because it may look slightly different from the rest of the fabric, sometimes with the manufacturer's name or type of fabric printed on the side. And because this edge can be a little tighter than the rest of the fabric, it isn't usually used in patchwork and piecing. So I'm going to cut this away first, and that will leave us with a nice straight edge to work from, which makes measuring and cutting our pieces much easier and more accurate. So next, we're going to be using a rotary cutter, and this is what we'll use to cut our fabric accurately alongside the quilting ruler. The blade is very, very sharp. So do take a little care when using it and always keep your fingers safely away from the blade. I'll show you how to hold and use it as we go along. But for now, just make sure the blade is safely closed whenever you are not using it. So we start by removing the salvage to give us that nice straight edge to work from. So hold your rotary cutter with the guard off. I'm using a 28 mil cutter here. Hold this in your dominant hand and position your ruler in your other hand and firmly grip it from on top, from above, almost in a claw like grip. You want to apply downward pressure here to stop your ruler from slipping and sliding and skidding across the fabric. The ruler must remain perfectly still whilst cutting. So let's take the cutter, and I hold it in this manner. I hope you can see, I'm going to apply moderate pressure. Remember, these are super, super sharp, so keep fingers out the way, and you don't have to hold it in a death grip and put lots of pressure on. They're really sharp. So we're going to cut in a forward motion away from the body. Always cut away, always cut forward, never in a soaring action. So if you find you've missed a little bit, never go backwards. You're always going forwards. Otherwise, you're going to end up with quite jagged edges. And what will also give you a jagged edge is if your blade is getting blunt, always keep some spare ones to hand. Most quilting patterns and projects will give you very specific measurements for the fabric pieces you will need to cut. This is why accurate precise measuring and cutting is so important. Now we've created our nice straight edge. Let's have a look at how we measure and cut our fabric accurately. I want to cut a three inch square. Our pattern is asking for a three inch square piece of this orange fabric. We can get rid of this and use this lovely straight edge we've just created as our starting point and we let the ruler do the maths. Top tip, just take a moment and look at your ruler. I'm using here a 9.5 square inch one. Have a look and I always keep my 1 " square in the top right of my ruler. This way, you can use these guidelines far more accurately, and it's far more simple to read. So we're asking for a three inch square. So let's position our ruler. You can see. I'm going to position. I'm just going to deal with the width first. We've got a nice straight line. So let's just think about 3 ". So as long as we go over 3 " here, we're going to measure this up. So this is all 3 ". Take your cutter. And you're going to cut straight up straight across, remove the excess. Now, what this has given us is the perfect right angle in this corner here. We're going to spin this fabric through 180 degrees. You've got your right angle, bottom left now. Once again, line up your 3 " Check that you've got 3 " square. Go to the bottom, find your three inch line along the bottom. It should be a three inch line across here and we simply take the top off. Depending on your cutting, that will leave you with a perfect three inch square. Okay, I'll run through that again very quickly. Let's say our pattern is asking for 2.5 " by 4 ". We've got a jaggedy edge here. Let's try and find a straighter edge. It won't always be straight. Don't assume they're straight just because they look straight. We're going to go 2.5 by four. Cut just a little bit over on both sides and you're going to cut up and you're going to cut across, and you're going to look for your right angle, which is here. Let's spin that 180 degrees. Giving us a right angle, and now we can measure up accurately 2.5 down to four. And I really suggest you take a little bit of time and just practice your cutting and measuring because this will result in far more accurate work. 6. Quarter Inch Seam: That. Little. So we're almost ready to start sewing, but before we do, very quickly, we need to understand the quarter inch seam allounce Another fundamental key cornerstone to achieving accurate piecing together of fabrics. In patchwork, quilting and piecing, we usually use a quarter inch seam alloance translated, this simply means that we stitch exactly a quarter inch from the edge of the fabric consistently. And using a quarter inch presser foot helps us to do that. I remember when I first started quilting, I was quite terrified when people started talking about seam allowances. It suddenly all started to sound so technical, a bit like the offside rule my boys will continue to explain to me. But please don't worry, let me show you just how simple it really is. Welcome to the quarter inch presifoot. This distance shown here gives you a perfect quarter inch seam. And here I'm showing you where your needle will be sewing. So we position our two pieces of fabric that need joining with that distance from the needle to the edge of the fabric at exactly a quarter inch thanks to our quarter inch pressifot. So it's not here and it's not here. With everything positioned correctly, we can now sew. So you've got these two pieces of fabric that we're joining together. They're both on top of each other, right sides together, we can start to sew. With our needle in the down position, I'm doing this really slowly so you can see exactly what's happening. My stitching is exactly a quarter inch from the edge of those pieces of fabric that is being joined together. And as long as you direct it and you keep control of the stitching, your seam allowance will be exactly a quarter of an inch. 7. Pressing and ironing : Just before we start making our first block, there's one more simple technique that will make a big difference to your patchwork and piecing and that is pressing. Now, pressing is different from ironing and as you sew your pieces together, it's important to press your seams as you go. This will help us to keep our work nice and flat and makes it easier to match and sew the next pieces together accurately. So here's a sample from our last lesson. You can see here a quarter inch seam allowance. I first want to show you how we press a seam open and pressing a seam literally means pressing. We're not going to iron backwards and forwards. We're going to press or plank, as I like to call it. I'm going to push the seam open and I'm going to press down using steam and a hot iron. Flipping this over, you can see how nice and flat this is another quick press with steam from the other side. So nice and flat, this is a seam pressed open. Another sample from our last lesson with a quarter inch seam allowance shown here, we're going to press this seam to the side. Again, we are pressing, planking, if you like, not ironing, not back and forth. Press from above, bit of pressure, lot of steam with a nice hot iron, flip it over and do the same again. Two examples of pressing a seam, both open and to the side, you will need both these techniques as we move through the blocks, and pressing as you go helps keep your patchwork neat and flat. 8. Making the Block: So, finally, it's time to get on with some sewing, and we're going to piece this first block together. We've chosen our fabrics. We've learned how to cut our pieces accurately. We've talked about the quarter inch seam allowance and how to press. So now it's time to put everything into practice and make our first block. I'm going to take you through each step, so don't worry this is your first time. Take your time, pause the video whenever you need to, and let's get started. In your resources section, you'll find this pattern for our block number one. You can choose to use two contrasting fabrics or four, if you like. But as you can see, the pattern is asking us for eight pieces to be accurately cut to these specific measurements. So we've got four in total of 3.5 inch by 1.5 inch and four of 3.5 inch by 2.5 inch. I've color coded the requirements here to keep things simple. And to refresh on the measuring and cutting techniques, please refer back to Lesson five of this class. Now I've accurately cut my eight pieces of fabric. I would recommend you lay them all out as the pattern is asking before you start sewing. In this simple block, there are different ways we can piece the fabrics together. We can put them together like this and we can sew along and make our seams down the center. Or we can put them together like so, and we can make our seams horizontally across the middle of these pieces. I'll stick with this method and I've got all my fabrics right sides up and I'm going to place them the ones I need to stitch together, right sides together. The right sides of the fabrics are touching one another. I'm then going to use my quarter inch foot and I'm going to stitch down here to give me a quarter inch seam allowance. When these are joined, we will have four pieces of fabric. We're going to join these two top pieces together now with a quarter inch seam allowce. I'm taking this first one super slow and close up for you so you can see exactly what I'm doing. You can see clearly here the quarter inch presser foot doing its job perfectly. You can see where I'm pointing that is stitching exactly quarter of an inch from the edge of that fabric. When we're done, we can finish up. We can lift the needle, lift the press a foot, and can take out two pieces that we have now stitched together. That's our top two pieces joined. I'm going to whiz you through quickly now the bottom three sections of this pattern that need to be joined. Here we are joining or piecing next precut components together. It's really worth taking your time to align your fabrics as accurately as you can before you sew, and they will lie far flatter with one another if they've add a quick press first. A concentrating on that quarter inch seam, we can now stitch down. I'm going to at this stage, demonstrate what we call chain piecing, which speeds the process up a little and saves on thread. That last piece we just did leave it on the machine bed there with your needle down, lift the pressifoot up and align your next two pieces that you're going to stitch together, concentrating on that seam and simply continue to stitch. So you didn't cut the thread, you didn't dismantle it at all. Just stitch down to the bottom of this piece and we're going to stop here just at the end with the needle in the down position. Get your last two pieces of fabric that need to be joined, align them well. This can be fiddly sometimes. And once they're ready to go, we just lift the pressifot and we butt it up as close as we can to the last pieces that we joined, and we continue to sew. And then once these are removed from the sewing machine, they can just simply be snipped and separated. Eight pieces of fabric have now become four. We've joined four seams here and we need to press them. I'd like you to press these open. Remember, we're not ironing, we're pressing. You can refer back to the last lesson of this class if you need to refresh. But by dragging the iron across in an ironing motion, you will distort your seams and we want to keep them as crisp and accurate as we can. Go So We're now ready to make our next two seams, and it's really important now that we have to concentrate on alignment. So we're going to want accurate crossovers with these fabrics. It's quite hard to show. It might be clear in the next photo, but you want these to be perfectly on point when they're joined. So you can look at your seam. Don't worry too much about the lengths of the fabric, but that is your exact point that you really need those fabrics to be joined together. Those points need to marry up. I'll just pop this photo on which shows precisely where the points are meeting up. We're now down to two pieces that we're obviously going to join together. Again, we concentrate on that meeting points. So here we've got four pieces of fabric meeting in one place. And this is where the eye is drawn to. Don't worry again too much about the length of this fabric. Concentrate on that meeting point. And we're going to sew obviously down this side to join our pieces up with a quarter inch seam. So we're joining now our last two pieces. You can see clearly the quarter inch seam is accurately in place here, and we're going to stitch down. We're going to go to the center. So you've obviously got a little bit more bulk here, so slow it down, even stop. Now you can see with that seam, I'm flattening it, so we're sewing over and always go slowly over the bumps just to keep things flat and not distorted. Our block is almost finished. We need to press this. And you've got obviously a lot more seams than you had when you started with. So we need to make sure they're all flat. So this is some real sort of heavy pressing with a hot iron and steam to get all those seams absolutely flat, and your piece will lay absolutely flat. There we go. Your very first pieced patchwork block. Have a close look at how your seams have married up, and don't be too hard on yourself if it's not perfect. You've learned a lot of new skills this past half an hour. You may be tempted to measure and trim your block to square it up, but for now, I'd encourage you to leave it just as it is. And there we have it a block number one. Hopefully, you can see how all those little steps that we've covered throughout this class come together. You've learned about choosing fabric, cutting accurately, sewing a consistent quarter inch seam, pressing your patchwork. You've put all of those skills into practice to create your first block. Again, I urge you to resist the temptation of trimming your block just for now. I hope you've enjoyed making your first block and more importantly, that it's given you a little taste of just how enjoyable patchwork and piecing can be. In our next class, we'll get straight down to making two more blocks using the skills you've learned here. There'll be no need to go back through all the basics again. We can simply get started and build on what you've already learned. Huge well done, please do share your work. Keep a safe hold of that first block and I hope you'll join me in the next class as you make block two and block three. I can't wait to see what you create.