Quilt Making Winter Project Piecing 16+ Blocks Resize Anysize

1. Intro Winter Quilt: Welcome to the quilt making winter project. I'm Elizabeth the instructor and I designed this quilt to be a lap quilt that will fit on you if you're sitting in a recliner, laying on a couch or just cuddling up and keeping warm. It's small and easy to transport around or store. For the most part, these blocks are individual themed with Christmas ornaments and items that you would commonly see during the holidays. Now, each one of these blocks can be used individually for its own project. Or you can make all of them and align it and place it together to complete this quill. It's laid out so that you as a beginner can enjoy each and every block and go along with me by simply using your phone or your tablet, placing it right there with you and following the steps. It's laid out so that you can actually promote yourself all the way up to intermediate and if you're professional, you won't get bored, feel the new welcomess of renewal and remembrance of things that you may have forgotten about. As far as supplies go, you will be using as small as 1 " all the way up to yardage. You can use pre cuts or scraps or anything that you desire. Your choice is simply that. Make it to customize and them to whatever you have in mind or various fabrics. It will be beautiful either way. The grand thing about taking a course here on skill share is you have the ability to go at your own pace. You also have the ability to speed up the video, slow it down, or advance to another one that's more suitable in your interest. In each one of these, you're going to learn about tools that you may or may not have or you may consider using them and we'll have some ideas of how they're implemented. You'll have a firm understanding of the terminology commonly used in quilt making. And you will gain the confidence to move forward and advance yourself to even more challenging levels. We will take an actual paper pattern and convert it in to a classic quilt block. We will also be showing how you can take those measurements and size them up or size them down. And then once again, you'll be able to take your projects, line them up, piece them together to have a completed quilt toe. Thank you so much for viewing this introduction. Let's get going on this quilt by first introducing you to some of the tools and supplies you may need in this journey. Just remember, a good shot pair of scissors and a nice straight stitching sew machine is sufficient. Although I may recommend a rotary cutter would be faster and more efficient when it comes to quilt making. Let's get in there. Join me in this adventure of making the Winter Project quilt. 2. Serious Quilter Tools: The rotary cutter is really a great tool, and using any of your straight edge rulers is the best. There are situations where you are cutting bulks of fabric, scissors come in handy. But when you're doing quilting, do try to get used to using a rotary cutter. You'll get a more accurate cut, and most everything is on a straight line. This is a Fiscus 45. Millimeter blade and it has the ability to be removed and replaced or sharpened and it has a guide here. Is a safety guide. It also has a button to close up the blade. Get in the habit of when you open your blade, you want to press that button as soon as you get done cutting and close that blade so that is not cutting you and it is out of the cutting position. I just wanted to go over the rotary cutter. Like I said, there are different styles. I have several different ones. This is the one I've been commonly using. When I push it forward, my blade is engaged. When I press the button, it is disengaged, that blade. This is your safety guide. It keeps you from getting cut. That right there is where it's at because when it's going against the blade and you're pushing, that is a guide that can actually rest against the actual cutting ruler. You have a quarter inch line on all of your rulers, and at your quarter inch line, lie that down on the actual stitch itself. When you do that, anything beyond it, you can cut off. Now you've allowed your quarter of an inch seam allowance, and I have a little wooden press here, little roll press. This is a nice investment to have in your arsenal. So for small things like this, you don't have to run to the iron. And as you can see, that's as flat as a flitter. It really does the trick. And it's just something about little roller that does it. Check this out. Look for the one that is a wooden roller on it. They do better. They're smoother, and they have been sanded down really well. 3. Tearfree Stitch Removal Easily: I'm going to take my seam ripper and I am very gently going to remove these background squares. I just really quickly go through there with my seam ripper and I can cut those stitches about every three or four stitches over, I just go through there real quick and I can pick up that little stitch and break it. What's really cool about that is when I do that on that side, I can come on the back side and tickle that thread up when I pull it, it's going to pull all those loose. It's going to pull all those little threads over to this side. And voila. That's going to free that up. All I have to do is pick those little broken stitches out and you don't have all this trouble and it comes out real easy. I'm going to finish removing this square. I just go every few stitches and I will break that thread. It's just a quick way that you can do it when you're able to see those threads. I pick it up and I break it and you don't have to worry about ripping your fabric when you do this if you are able to pick that stitch and then once you go I don't know, maybe every four or five stitches and pick it. You can then go to the other side and just tickle that thread up. It's going to let go. Then when you get it tickled up, pull it and it lets go of that square real easy. Then anything that I have left, of course, I can just move that stitch out real quick and it does not take but seconds to get this loose and you don't damage your fabric. You don't rip it or get it torn or frayed up and make it hard to use it. These intersected whenever I sewed them. Of course, you're going to have that anchor stitch that's going to hold tight and sometimes just come into this side of the fabric and just pulling it towards you to let it go. Then I'll pull on the fabric a bit so I can get the thread to come up to me and I don't have to dig in there and start destroying that fabric. Sometimes you can do a little corner brake and you can get it to let it go. There we go. 4. Candy Block 1 Quick 4 Half Square: Now, to make the candy block, cut 25 inch squares of the main fabric have elected to make the candy width. The next thing we're going to need is 2.5 inch squares. So what I've done is I've cut me a long strip of fabric, the width at 2.5 " wide, and I'm going to cut 2.5 inch squares from out of this strip. This will be for our corners to make our candy. What we're going to do with this is we're going to take one of our five inch squares, and we are going to sew one square to this corner from here to here and another on this corner from here to here. To make it easier, if you want to, you can use one of your friction pins, which the ink will be removed from an iron, but it won't be seen or cause a problem or be visible. So you can draw a line, and this way, it'll help you whenever you put this underneath the sewing machine. So I just take my ruler and a light there, and then I just draw me a line from corner to corner. That way, when I get to the sewing machine, I can see it a whole lot easier, and then I can just sew a quarter of an inch down the center on that line. Another thing that I do that speeds up the job is I sew another line stay a quarter of an inch away because we'll need that seam allowance. Also me another seam here. This will develop these little miniature half quarter inch squares, and I can use them either in the binding or perhaps on another smaller job. But those will already be made. And then that way, all I have to do is sew directly on that line when I get to the sewing machine. I'll sew right down on the line. This will give me my seam allowance, and I can sew on that line as well. So now we've sewn our line, and I went ahead and sewn this side too. We're going to cut this live in a quarter inch allowance, that's real easy because we already created that line. All we have to do now is beside this right on that quarter inch, I've got over my line and allow that quarter inch seam allowance, and there we have this little square. Let's go to the iron and we're going to iron and press these back. So now we have the body of our candy made. The next step is we need to cut a five inch square of our background fabric, and we need another five inch square of our main fabric. And what we're going to do, we're going to lay these right sides together because we need our end wrappers for our candy, and this is how we're going to make our end wrappers, sew them both together all the way around. The next thing we want to do is we want to cut this square. The first cut we're going to make is diagonal from corner to corner. Then we're going to do the same here. We're going to cut it this direction from corner to corner. Just line up your ruler from corner to corner. Now we have four. Before we take these to the ironing board and press them open, we want to square them up. So now we have all four pressed open. So this is what we're looking for. We need this square to be at 3 ", and they are perfectly at three inch. Here's our three inch mark. Here's our three inch mark. I say three inch square. You really wanted to get rid of these little dog ears, you can. We now have our body made that is 5 " square. And we have our two half quarter square triangles. These are our ends. So when we put this together, this will be our wrappers. We need strips on each side of our five inch square. We already know it's 5 ". The width because we need to allow for the seam allowance from here to this distance, we need a half inch. We already know it's 3 " wide or blocks. We need to cut this strip 3.5 " by 5 " long. So what I'll do now is go to the zone machine and on each side of this block, I am going to sew this to this side and this one to this side. Now we have those pressed open. Now we need to create our fabric lengths for the width of our block. That's real easy to measure too. We know that we need our half inch seam allowance, and now we know that the length of this are five plus or three so now we have a 7.5 inch length here. Well, we have to have a half inch seam allowance, and that is going to put us at the eight inch mark of fabric, and I can sew my block to the end of it, and you're going to attach those, and this is how you're going to build your block. Now, these are a little bit wider because of the allowance that I had not thought about until I begin putting my block together. I can square that up once I've attached these, I can cut that off. We need these two points to intersect perfect. We need the point of that tip to intersect perfectly with this. When you go to sew it at the machine, you want to nest those seams together and make sure that you have them lined up and attach this to the bottom and this one, we want to attach to the top. If you want to put a pin there just to keep it from shifting, you can. It's a little square up our block. A lot of times I will line mine up on my mat. It makes it just as easy and my main concern is my half quarter square and centering this, making sure it intersections with my lines. The same here. You can check that and that seems to be intersecting just perfectly. This is off just a hair, but not enough to hurt, and that may end up being the case with you going to go right up beside and make sure all that. Is even, and I'm going to do the same on this side, and I will turn it. And now I know that all that looks pretty good. So now, once again, I want to make sure that anything that looks out of shape comes off 'cause I'm squaring this block to 9.5. 5. Square Up How to: Now we have four. Before we take these to the ironing board and press them open, we want to square them up. If you have a ruler that perhaps does the easy flying geese, you can see there is a line here at the 2.5 inch mark. If I lay this underneath this ruler, you can very easily see that even allows for the seam allowance and that one looks pretty good. It's right on that 2.5 inch line mark. If I moved it up to the two inch mark, which is the seam allowance, can see there's just a little bit of an edge there. But I need this to line up so that the triangle itself is showing 2.5 inch mark. The other way you can do it is if you have the lock block ruler, if you look right here where the 2.5 inch area lines up, you will get the same reading. If you slide that triangle up, this triangle is perfect. There's nothing wrong with it, at the 2.5 inch and the 2.5 inch mark. There's the smallest tiniest mound. Check this one as well with the lock block ruler. And we're doing this before we iron it open. We have just a little bit here on this side, and there might be a small amount on that side. Just hair line. So not even enough to really bother with. 6. Gift Box Block 2 Flying Geese: This block is called the present block or the gift block. We're going to start off with a ten inch square or you can have four, five inch squares. Going to sub cut this into 5 " right down the middle and we are going to turn this in to four, five inch squares. That is why I said, If you have pre cuts or if you have yardage, this is really, really simple and you can quickly just turn your en inch square into four, five inch squares, and this is going to make the gift itself. The next thing we need to cut is the ribbon that will run in the center, an inch and a half of whatever you choose to be your tie for your ribbon and your bow. Out of this strip for the ribbon, the very first bits of ribbon that we're going to need is, of course, 5 " long. We need two of the inch and a half strips that are 5 " long. Where this ribbon is going to go is right down the side. The first thing I'm going to do is put the right sides together and sew this right down here, do the same for this one. Now we want to go to the ironing board and press that back. Now that we have that side song on, we want to go back to the sewing machine and we want to sew these on to the other side. Press this seam to where it folds inward. The reason being is by doing that, it tucks those seams inside. This particular block would change in size and we want to keep it this certain size that we're going for. Plus, it will help this stripe to show up even better when we do that. As I was saying, if you were to press one side, inward and one side outward, it would change the size of this block. To make sure that this block stays straight, even, shows up more of the band of this ribbon and does not change in the size with each other. If we just press those scenes inward, it will keep it squared and also keep it in line with what we are trying to achieve. And we want to show off that beautiful ribbon for our gift. Now we need to create our strip here. That's really easy. All you have to do is basically measure the two together, and as you can see, it is 10 " long. We need an inch and a half strip that is 10 " long because that's the size of our block now. Take it back to the machine and first I'm going to sew on this side. Again, when you press, you want to press this open so that your fold and seam is underneath it and being tucked inward before we sew this one on. That's looking really nice tucked in right there. Now let's add this side on. Then when we press this, we want to press this seam inward. We have those tucked in the middle and that will show off that ribbon. That is looking just absolutely beautiful. We have all of our seams tucked in, laying nice and flat as a flitter that's the whole idea. Sometimes just taking that time to press that, it makes a world of difference, especially when you want to show up a very narrow piece of fabric. We need two, 2.5 inch squares. This is going to make our bow a top of our present. I have my two pieces there. Now I got to have a 4.5 inch long piece, at least one of my background. We're basically going to make a flying geese, but this is going to be the easiest flying geese you have ever seen. This is how we're going to do it. Make it very, very easy. First, we are going to lay one square to sew from corner to corner. Only focused on that one. And it is easier to take a kind ink pen and draw a line from corner to corner so that you can sew on that line. That'll help keep you straight when you're at the machine. If you do as I do, I take that same square, and from that line, I lay my mark on that line, and I measure over a half And I draw another line. The reason being is these make miniature little squares. These are excellent for putting on your binding or scrap squares. You can make all these little orphan squares and sew them together, making them into another. So when I go to the machine, I will sew from this corner to this corner, and then I will sew that as well so that when I cut it off, I have a finished miniature square. You only want to do this side first because these two will end up overlapping. And as you can see how I'm seeing how the fabric is flowing there, you have the stripes coming this way. So when I do this one, I will make sure that the stripes are flowing in that same direction and they'll almost match each other. Take and draw our line. Now, when you do this side for this side, we're going to sew this one first. When you do this side, we want to sew from here, down from this corner to the next corner. Makes it easier. Mark that and once again, I will make my half inch mark over further. Go ahead and draw that so that piece is already marked for me to sew it on. Same song, and I went ahead and did that one so I can get my little mini square. And super simple, I just take and I put it on my quarter inch measurement. And I just cut that off. You could do it with a pair of scissors. There's no plain signs to it. Iron this back before we go to this square. There's my little mini square I spoke of. I'll put it in my pile with my other ones as I make this quilt. And now we can move on to this one. Now remember why I said this one when you sew it on, is going to overlap this one. That's why we can only do one at a time. Once again, I will go ahead and pin that into place so it doesn't slip on me and just make sure you line it up and write down that scene. I'm going to measure that quarter of an inch over. I just place my quarter inch line on my song line at that back now we can iron this open easiest flying geese you have ever done. Pressed it open, there is a beautiful, perfect flying geese. Well, if we center this in the center of our block and we know this was 10 " across, everyone's is going to be different. That's why it's important to measure this because if your seam allowance is more than a quarter or it's a scant quarter, then you would have to cut this ribbon strip longer and so forth the same way up here. Now we know this one is 4.5 ". So even if I just make it easier by vision, I can see that that right there is two and three quarter, and then this one right here is three. The simple math on that, we can cut a 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch for each side of this block of our background fabric. I have two pieces of 2.5 by 3.5 inch background fabric. I need to sew to each side of my bow. Press mine outward on this particular one to attach this to the top of prism. Now, we're not quite done because we want to square this up. Even though it looks beautiful, we might have some wonkiness because of these pieces having to be done apart. Also, when you press this one, make sure that you press that towards the dark color, the gift itself. You want this to press down this away. It does make a difference and that's why you may have to square it up depending on the softness of your fabric. And how well it presses. When you are looking at your bow, center the bow seems will be easier lined up and that will give you a center point. Then as you look down here at the rest of your block, you can see what might be going which way and shifting and so forth. That just gives you a center point to focus on. Down here at the bottom, same way, square up with the edge, either a half or a whole, I'm going to take off that whole bottom. That way, it looks nice and squared up. For this block, we have a finished block, 11.5 by ten. You can take every one of these blocks and just take one block and finish the whole quilt, or you can do each one of these in this quilt long series of making the winner quilt. 7. Tree Block 3 Resize Anysize: For the tree block, we're going to start out with this ten by ten inch square. We're going to turn it over on the back. Begin with, we want to come down on our fabric 3 " and we're just going to place a mark. This is the friction pin. It erases with heat, but no one's going to see this. This is our five inch mark in the very center of our fabric is over here on the side, on each side of our square, we're going to put the side of our ruler to the 0.5 inch point. We're going to move it over 1.5 " in. So from the corner, we're going to come over 1.5 ". The way that you can tell is just line up the corner of that 1.5 inch mark. So if you come in 1.5 ", at the very side of that and put the very top point right where we made our five inch mark. We're going to draw a line, create our angles for the size of our tree and we're going to do the same thing on the opposite side. You want to make sure that we come in 1.5 inch mark. Right here, if we come in to this point, this is 1 ", that's a half inch and lining our ruler up with that 1.5 inch. I usually just pick a line on the ruler in that vicinity and put it there, and then I bring my side of my ruler up to the tip. Now I'm at the 1.5 " in on this side. Once again, I want to draw a line down the side, meeting those two points, and that has our tree. Now all we have to do is go up here and line line back up. Real simply, we're just going to go straight across here and you can save that piece out of our way. Then we're going to do the same thing here. We're going to actually cut the marks that we made. Going to cut that off and get our tree design out. It's just easy to show you with the lines already drawn. Well, we get our triangle shape from out of our ten inch square. We want to make sure that we cut right on that line. Because when we do our backing fabric, we're going to do the same thing. We have our extra pieces here. We can use those for something else, as I've selected white as my background fabric. What's really great about this is you can lay your fabric down. We have our triangle and we line it up with the edge, and we are going to actually cut this piece to match our tree because that will be our sew lines. At this point, we want to go 1 " above. So on the original ten inch we measured 7 ". We took 3 " off the top. So with this ten inch, we're only going to take 2 " off of this piece. So we're going to come down up here and we're going to leave that inch above, make sure you're good and lined up because we only get one opportunity to do this. Take that 2 " off at the top. Now we have our fabric over here. Next thing we do on this is we do the very same thing. We're going to find. We're going to come down 1 " from the top, find our center of this piece of fabric. You can fold this in half if you like. This one way is just as easy as the other. I'm going to make a mark on that five inch line, and we're going to come in 1.5 " as before. But this time, when we come in that inch and a half, we're going to cut the whole length. We just need that center point mark at our five inch point. We're going to come in 1.5 " and we're going to cut. We're going to do the same thing on this side. We need to save that piece. We're going to come in 1.5 ", and you can turn that until you see that one, and there's your half. Now we have our two side pieces. Now, this is what we're going to do. We have our tree, and if these pieces were here just like that, so it's simple and easy to do. When you do your tree, the mistake that I made and I forgot to mention to you until I began sewing it down. You shorter cut side, the one that you have a tip sewn off of, when you cut it, you've got one that's a straight edge and you'll have one that just goes off to a nip. You want to sew this side on first, when you do that, it's going to lie down for you. And then when you sew the straight edge side over it, it's going to come out like this. I'm going to make that correction on mine, and I wanted to make sure that I shared it with you. When I cut this, we cut the left side first, which was a straight edge, and we cut the right side, which is the one with a little bit of a nip to it. You want to sew your nipped edge on first because you've got to slide it down and make sure it meets down here and then stitch it down and it will overlap that short side. So now I have pressed that back down like it should be, and I can now take this side and stitch it back. And when I do, I want to go all the way out to the top. I want to follow that stitching all the way to the top and then press it over. Now, when you do that correctly, you'll barely even have anything up there. Matter of fact, when you lay that block down, you can barely see anything up there at the top and it just makes it smooth. So this is now sung correctly, and we need to create a trunk and we also need to allow for a half inch seam allowance. You can find the center of your tree by using your ruler and finding the middle point, and we can see that it is 3 " this way, so it'd be 3 " this way. That means the width of our tree is 6 " wide. We also know that we have these seams on the side. The whole width here is 9 " long. Right now we need to decide on how big of a trunk we need. So if the middle point of our tree is 3 " to the middle point, and we want the trunk to be fairly noticeable, and we're going to have a half inch seam allowance on each side of it, and we'll need a half inch seam allowance for this top edge. So let's cut a 2.5 inch square for our tree trunk. We know the whole width of this block is 9 " long. We just need to add the difference. If we have basically an inch and a half left because we've already allowed for the seam allowances and we know that this is 9 ", that would put us at the seven and three quarters of an inch. Well, we have to divide that in half, we got to have a three and three quarter inch piece here and a three and three quarter inch piece here. That is 2.5 " wide. If you want to just cut them at 4 " and then you can square these up, that sometimes is the better resort to make it easier for you and you don't have to think it out. We're going to sew a strip down this side and a strip down this side. I'm going to press these seams towards the dark side inward on this. So now I press that inward and that is a very robust trunk for the tree, and I'm just centering my trunk. And if you want to, you can place your block on your mat. You know this piece is 9 " and you can find the center of that. You can eyeball it or you can be exact. Whichever one works for you, I usually pretty much eyeball it. I have a sense of where it looks like it should be and I can see how much is overhanging. Now I'm going to go to the machine and I'm going to sew all the way across. For this particular one, because these seams are pressed inward, I do not want this to shift during the time in which I am going to sew it because the fabric is soft and press and these may stretch when I'm feeding that through the machine. I do not want to pull those seams. Open to keep them planted. You can put a few pins. If you feel like these will open up or push out or pull out and get wonky, that parts on down. Also, if you're concerned about this overhang peeking through, this would be the time to trim that off before you take it to the sewing machine. That's looking really nice and I'm going to press that open and I will press this towards the tree to keep those tucked in. Now we need to square up this block. We're just going to clean that edge up over there. And then the same over here. It's really good up top. That's just fine for whenever I tie this into my actual quilt. When we measure this block, we have a finished block of 8.5 by 9.5. You can make several of those. You can take this one block and create an entire quilt with it and make all of your trees different sizes and different colors. 8. Candy Jar Block 4 Small Looks Big: Now, in the wintertime, it is suitable to make a cookie jar to go with our winter quilt. So the cookie jar, we are going to cut a five by ten inch piece of fabric. That way, it depicts a one quart jar, 5 " by 10 " long piece of fabric. This is going to be the body of the actual jar. So in order to make this jar come full form, I need some inch and a half Tim fabric. By an inch and a half squares, we'll need four of those. Now we have four little snowball pieces. We're basically going to lay one on each corner of our square and just lay it from corner to corner and draw a line. A lot of times when it's this ball, you can eyeball it on your machine, but just in case it only takes a moment to draw a line, I will go ahead and pin them into place and draw my line. It's just so easy to follow that line. For me, it's a lot easier, and it shows you which direction to go in case you're watching the video and sewing along with me and it keeps us from getting confused. That way, if we do get vertical, we have a roadmap to go by and this makes it so simple, just a moment to do it. Please that then once again, this one is going this direction. That way we make sure that our angles are no longer a challenge to us. We take the math out of the equation right on that line will sew directly down on that line. So now we've got the song at our angles and we can cut that difference off before we iron this back. We want to press those back. We want to allow that quarter of an inch seam allowance. What I do is I use my ruler. This is a quarter of an inch shading on this side, and all I have to do is lay those little crosses right on that line and then cut right down the side of it. It's just that little smidge coming off there because the rest of it is going to be tucked into our quilt. Now, let's go to the iron and press these back. We have our jar made and we've got it snowball. Now we need to create a lid for our jar. Now we know that our block here is 5 " wide. That's simple math. We need this piece to be an inch and a half tall, because we did our snowballs at an inch and a half versus an inch and a quarter, we can see right here that our body of our jar is shown to be 2 ". The thing we have to bear in mind is we need to drop down at least a quarter of an inch to see that width into our block here and then measure how much body is showing because when you sew your lid on, you are going to be coming in a quarter of an inch seam allowance. That is really going to show off what your lid is going to look like to extend a quarter of an inch beyond these snowballed shoulders to truly look like a lid. If we measure that 3 " in length, if you wanted to ensure that it does look a little bit bigger, you could do a 3.5 inch in length. Do your side background as an inch and a half squares, and this needs to be an inch and a half with 3.5 inch section out of this. Already have our three inch piece. We sew on our background pieces that are inch and a half by inch and a half squares or pressed. These were the same as inward. That way, the black is really showing off and I've got my background fabric. We just need to attach it, so we're going to go back to the sew machine and we're going to attach our lid and just sew straight across the top. Press that seam towards the body of the jar. That turned out pretty good. Square up my block to make sure five by ten. And anything that's kind of wonky and hanging over from the strips, sometimes when your fabric gets soft from the pressing and using, you can get little bits of these pieces, a little bit of fray, and this side looks pretty good. 9. Endless Possibilities Piecing: So there we have our five by ten inch jar block. And if we want to, we could add another little block to the side here. We had some leftover squares, and we could probably put something over here on the side, maybe like little candy stripes or little candies, different things. You could make a shape. I love my little half squares because you can do so much with them. And so that would look like some candy maybe on the side of the jar. And then you could add background fabric to the top in the side. I have the candy pieces and you could just change them up anyway you want. 10. Quilt Whispers Orphan Blocks 5: Now we've got our candy jar made or cookie jar. Let's make some miniature candies. I have a three inch wide strip of the same fabric that's going into the body of my jar. I need 23 by three inch squares, and this is really going to be great. As we did our candies before, we need that point of that little half square triangle coming in. These half squares came off the top of when we made the bow for the present gift and also the candy wrapper from before. If you needed to make this, if you had not made that block and you need to make this, this is a two by two inch half square triangle. You could just cut a two inch fabric and a two inch white square and sew them together, and then you can cut that. Since I have these leftover, I'm going to tie them in to this and make this into a candy. But what I have to do is I need to snowball the corners of this and that's real easy. I need to cut four inch and a half squares, cut some inch and a half squares out of. This is a cut off from making the tree block. The reason why I'm doing an inch and a half this is a three inch by three inch square. If I use an inch and a half, then that's half of the width of these pieces of our square, and that's where I'm getting that number from. We are going to snowball each side of this square. The way that we will do that we're going to go in this way. We're going to do that line, once again, drawing my line from side to side. And over here the same way. I'm going to draw that line, and I'll do the same to that square up there. So I'm just showing you what I'm doing. Drawing a line. And I do this so that I don't even have to worry about it when I get the machine, and just put it under there and sew it. Let me go to the machine and sew on that line for both squares. I just lay my quarter of an inch on the actual line so that it's over and I cut that little edge off and do the same on all sides. I go to the ironing board and press these open. Little candies. Bodies made. We need that half inch seam allowance that we need to put sides on our block. So since this is 2 " wide, once again, we need this to be 2 " wide, but we need to allow our seam allowance. So we're going to cut a 2.5 inch by three inch long piece to be sewn to the sides. And we need to cut four of those. Background fabric. This is a 2.5 inch wide strip, and I need four pieces that are 3 " long. I've got two folded it here so I can cut two at a time off of this strip. These are our sides for our candy. Let's go to sewing machine, and we will say one down that side, and then the other on this side, and we'll repeat the same on this candy. All right. I have my side sewn on and press back and I did put the seams inward towards the body, and there will be extra on this when we square it up. For the time being, we've got our bodies, and we've got our side pieces, or background pieces. The way this is going to work is we need our wrapper at the opposing ends. We know that our little wrappers are 2 " wide and 2 " tall. We need the difference in our length, so it's real easy to measure all you have to do is we know that's going to be attached in a corner and if you needed to to make it easy on you, you could just pretend that that one was there. What we are measuring is from this corner to that corner, then we have to add on a half of an inch seam allowance. At this point, that's one, two, three, four, and a half plus another half would be five. We need a five inch piece that is two inch inches long attached. We need four background strips to match our little wrappers. Now we need to go and attach a candy box to each one of these. Now remember, it might be a little bit extra wide depending on how you have square triangles came out and that's simply okay, we're just matching it up to the fabrics that we have because this is how this is going to play out. This will be up here. So we need to attach those two, and this one will be pointing in here, so we need to attach these two. And then on this one, we have the same thing going on. We have a strip and then our candy wrapper, and here's the other strip. Once again, we'll go to the sewing machine, and we're going to sew this little square or rectangle. I have those sewn on, take them to the ironing board and press them open. Okay, so now we have our piece attached, and now we need to sew these two our candy. Remember, you want to make sure that that point and this point line up together. Since we pressed this one inward, and we pressed this one outward, those seams will nest up perfectly, and this will take the math and the worry out. See how those seams are just nesting together. You got this one going this way and you got this one going this way. If you just lay it in there and rub it a little bit. They will nest up perfectly and you'll have no slippage. We want those to come together because that's what makes that wrapper to that candy look perfect. We'll sew that down to this side and we'll do this one the same way. Our candies are looking absolutely adorable and we need to square them up. I'm going to allow the actual squares to be my guide. This one looks a little bit wonky, but sometimes that happens because, well, those were made from a larger block. I'm just going to square this up by laying my ruler there and that's going against that one square. Then this side over here, I can compensate for later, but I'm going to pretend that that square made it all the way over here. I can cut off the difference on this block to square it up. When I make that one is already over there, if I need to, I can compensate for that later. I think it will be fine because it's an eighth of an inch and I have an eighth of an inch here, and my quarter of an inch sewing seam allowance should take care of that. This way, my block is good and cleaned up. Our block here are one candy, so we have an exact measurement here. 5.5 by 5.5 and that's perfect block, and we're going to do this one the same way. What I'll do is once I square up the other candy block, I'll place these candy blocks here and you can turn them this way or you can turn them this way. It's really up to you. Let me square up this one, we'll give it another look. So now I've squared up my two blocks and I've laid it beside my jar and the squares here are almost as big as the jar, per se. They actually are. But by the time these are sewn together, there will be a slight difference. Here are ways that you can fix that. Number one, you can put a very small, minute strip in there that is so tiny to connect these together. Or you can go ahead and sew these two blocks together and you could add something to the bottom if you wanted to or the top and the third choice. You could even trim down your jar and attach it your candy to the side. Those are choices you can make. Now, for me, when I look at this and I evaluate it, it will be just as easy for me to attach a small strip down here. If there's anything left, I can cut it off. I took my 2.5 inch strip and I just sewed it to the bottom and just left it attached. A lot of times that is easier and as you can see, there's just a slight difference because the way they are termed, 2.5 inch piece, even with this block, I can take that quarter off and that will just square it up all at the same time. Here's our extra that we had sewn. Here's our candy jar, and I am going to sew these two pieces together before I trim it off. So I'm going to take this to the sewing machine, and I'm going to sew write down this sin. I press this open and I press that seam towards the body, towards the dark side of that jar. Look how gorgeous this looks. Now, all I have to do is cut off the difference, and I know that I have to do that even with the bottom edge of this jar. Cookie candy jar block was already squared up before we started. Now I can just square it up with this piece, lay my ruler right across the bottom edge of my jar. We are ironing these beautiful cotton fabrics. We get a little bit of stretch getting our blocks made, and so they might look a little wonky, but it all works out when you squared up the block. I just look really nice. Look at that. We have our beautiful okie candy jar quart size with two candies in addition, made from our half square triangles made from our previous blocks that we've already made, and that's how you can utilize that and it really just starts telling you what it wants to be. Your quilt actually tells you which way to go with it and depicts on what is going to turn out to be. Every time you have these little scrap pieces and you can look at it and go, Wow, what can I do with this? The candy block that we made in our first block of this winter quilt depicted that we would have these little blocks left over from it. By doing that present block it depicted that we had these two little blocks leftover from it together, the four of those with a little bit of the body of our jar made two beautiful candies that attached to the jar and it just complements, well, this is the candy from the candy jar, just by having done the two previous blocks. 11. Sewing Machine Block 6 By Measure: The next block is the sew machine. This is what you're going to be needing. You'll need to pick out a fabric for your sew machine 2.5 inch wide strip, and it needs to be at least 19.5 " long. A 2.5 inch strip of your background fabric, 19.5 ". You'll need a small amount of 1.5 inch strip to 3.5 by 3.5 inch square of your background. A small amount of black fabric, 2.5 " long, by 1 " wide, and the same with your background fabric. This will make needle. Create our needle 1 " by 2.5 inch, strip of black, and a one by 2.5 inch strip of white for two strips. Now, this is what is really significant and you have to sew it this way for it to come out right. We're going to lay our black down. We're going to take our white strip, follow what I'm doing, and we're going to lay it sideways. Like that. The way we need to sew this is we are going to create a diagonal line from right to left. We're going to start in the upper corner and we're going to sew down to the lower left corner. That way, our angle is correct whenever we get this song. But this line gives you an area of guys. Let's go to the machine and let's sew from the upper right to our lower left. There we are our T tiny little lines on from right to left. Also minimize your stitch to 2 millimeters versus 2.5 because this is so tiny that way that makes sure those threads stay in there good and snug. All we have to do is cut this little corner off. You have a quarter inch line on all of your rulers, and at your quarter inch line, lie that down on the actual stitch itself. When you do that, anything beyond it, you can cut off. Now you've allowed your quarter of an inch seam allowance. Now, this is what's really clever about this. We're just going to push that back and you can finger press it, and as you can see, mine is slightly off and a little bit over on problem we'll take that up whenever we add our other pieces on. Since we have our needle made, see our little angle going there. We need this piece itself to measure 3.5. We want to cut off any difference that we have here and just make sure that is good and pull back. Now, we need to make sure that our 3.5 " is coming from the top. N all of the black in this. We have our 3.5 inch long needle. We just need to start adding our other pieces to it. Now there is a system to which side you put what in order for your needle to look correctly, A 1.5 inch wide strip that is 3.5 " long. This will be sewn to the left side of the needle. Now there is no harm if you make your sewing machine going the opposite way, if you follow the instructions I'm giving you, your machine is going to sit like this. But if you do it the opposite way, don't sweat it, you can make your machine going to the right. We're going to sew this 3.5 inch strip onto this side of our needle. That's looking really good. Now we need to add a 3.5 inch square onto the right side of our needle. So our 3.5 inch background fabric, we're going to attach to this side of our needle. Now that's looking really good. When you go to the iron this time, make sure that you allow these, they're going to naturally just open up on this particular needle because it's so small, we want to allow that. We want to press these seams open just like they're naturally flowing. That won't change very much. It wants to wing out anyway and that's what we want so that we see all of that needle. So for the very top part above to start building the body, we're going to take the fabric we selected for our sew machine and we're going to cut 2.5 inch by five inch piece. Let's attach that to the top to the machine and sew that down. So we've got that pressed back, always pressed towards the dark side, as our scene. And the next piece we're going to cut is going to go down the side. 2.5 by 5.5 ". If yours turns out to be a little bit smaller, like mine actually turned out to be 4.5 because of my seam allowances, concerned, all you have to do is lay it against your ruler and measure it. And here we have 5.5 ". That is the length once this piece is added on. So that's how we know to cut that 12.5 by 5.5. And this time, when we take it to the sew machine because our sew machines going this way. So we want to lay this down and sew it down the right side of our piece. That's looking fantastic. Let's press this open, pressing towards the doors. Yes. I'm going to add a background piece on this side. This piece, we can cut out of our 2.5 inch strip, 2.5 inch by 5.5 inch background fabric. Now let's go to the machine. We're going to lay this right side together and stitch down this side. Our sewing machine is really shaping up and looking beautiful. So now let's measure our length. So here's our strip. And naturally, we're going to take it to the machine, right sides together, and I'm going to sew that down. So let's press this back towards the dark side and see how it looks. Look at that. Isn't that precious? Oh, my goodness. That is adorable. As I said before, every one of these quilt blocks, if you wanted to make an entire quilt with the actual block, it would be just beautiful. Have a finished block here that is seven by nine per the instructions. Mine actually finished out to be a little bit smaller than that. The height of my block here is seven and a quarter and it's actually eight and a quarter inches long. I yours turns out that size, no worries. 12. Customized Blocks: Now to finish up our sewing machine block, we need to put a little crank arm over here. All you're going to need for that is an inch and a half by 2.5 inch piece of fabric and your background fabric being the same size. And we're just going to take these tuning machine and sew them together. And this will equal 2.5 " in width in order to attach this and make it fall where we desire. We need an inch and a half by 2.5 inch piece to sew above it. And then we need a that's going to put our dial for our crank in that location. And this is depicting that your block is coming out the same as mine. But down below it, we will need by 2.5 inch wide piece to attach, and that will be sewn together. So let's cut that out. Okay? That will go above it, and we'll sew that together and attach it. And we will just attach this to the bottom and sew across there. And now all we have to do is take it to sew machine and attach our crank to the side. Now, if you want to add a spool up here, when we did the ugly sweater block, we had all of these little mini squares. And one way that we can do this is since these half square triangles are already cut, we can take two of them and turn them into, say, an hourglass. And the way we do that is we take the color and we lay the color opposite of each other. We've got that. And what we want to do is with our colors laying opposite of each other. We want to sew from corner corner. And if it's easier, you can draw a line. Now, if you draw a line, one thing that you can do on this sew down that line and then cut off this difference. Okay? So I've saw right in the center. Now, I want to show you this before you decide which side you want to cut off and depending on your colors, open it up and see what it looks like. See if this is the side that you favor with these colors or is it this side that you favor? And then that way, you'll know which side to cut. Because I know that these little tiny fabrics will literally disappear whenever I go to sew this. I'm probably going to select this side right here. That's just something that you can consider whenever you make one of these. I'm going to lay my quarter of an inch seam allowance on there right on that song line as we have the others and I'm going to cut off the difference. Then that way, I now can press this open. Now I've got that pressed open. And one thing I want to share with you when you do this hour glass one, press this seam open on it. And when you do that, it will put less bulk in the fabric because you already have one that's folded over. And then your new seam, press it open, and it will lie a lot flatter. That way you won't have this puffed up place. Now, mine measures an inch and three quarter square. That's what I have. What I will do is I am wanting my per se spool to be in this area, which is in this 2.5 inch area of the other fabric. Because of this odd number, I'm going to round it off to 1.5. I'm going to pretend that this is 1.5 inch square and the same up there. We already know that this is 2.5 " wide. We need a 2.5 inch by 1.5 inch piece to go on the right side. The difference that we will need is just basically, as we've been doing before, we can take our ruler, I'm going to allow my half inch seam allowance on this side and measure to this side. I know that I need a seven inch by 1.5 inch strip for this side of my sewing machine. Go ahead and square up my little square in order to get that inch and a half that I am trying to achieve. And I'll cut off that little bit of difference so that when I sew this on, I won't be struggling with keeping myself vertically, and I'll do the same. I'll just turn around my little spool. Quarter can really truly throw you off when you're trying to do something this small. But I'm just adding more character and detail. Remember, you do not have to do this part of the sew machine. You could opt to skip by this. So now I have these two pieces, and I need a 7.5 inch by 1.5 inch strip to go down the other. And we want this hourglass, which is our spool of thread to be up and down. That way, it truly looks like a spool of thread. You can light this way because some machines do have their thread flowing sideways. We're going to sew our 2.5 inch by one half inch strip to one side of it, and press it back, and then we're going to sew our 1.5 by seven inch strip to the other side and press it back. Now that just looks plum adorable. And I know that when we attach our others, we're going to just have a very small spool. But for the time being, we want to line these two scenes up. As you notice, I press this one outward and this one outward so that when I get to these scenes, I can lay that over it and it will nest perfectly. Now we just need to attach that. Well, our little sum machine just looks adorable. So let's square off this extra piece that I had here. I'll just center it on my mat. And I do know that my machine did turn out a little bit shorter, and that is all due to my song themes, and yours may, as well. And that's simply okay. Happens whenever you're doing certain things and don't worry about it. Do not even let it be a big deal. And at this point, we have a ten inch by eight inch. So really, that's going to be somewhere around 10.5, maybe 10 ", and at least 8.5. Mine did end up shorter, and I will actually trim mine two exactly. Inches. And there again, this is where whenever you're sewing seams together and you got small pieces, as well as the measurements. And depending on your seam allowance, if you did a scan or if you did an entire quarter will cause differences in your block sometimes, and that is okay. You have the math and you know how to measure of laying your ruler up there and allowing your seam allowances by adding the half inch on, and then you know the difference. Because if you already know your measurements here and you're doing something different and deviating as we did with the spool, you just have to remember that half inch seam allowance on each side. Then you can attach it without stressing and fighting with sizes. So if you have squared up your sew machine, yours may be 10.5 to 11 " wide, and it could possibly be up to 8.5 " tall. That makes a nice block. Now we have a sewing machine with our crank and our spool. 13. Snowballing Pro Wreath Block 7: A reef. And what's unique about the reef is you can use all 2.5 inch wide strip of fabric, or you can take one single ten inch square of fabric because the very first strip are 2.5 " wide by 9 " long. So I'll cut those first, and I can trim those up once I have them cut two pieces that are 5 " long, that are 2.5 " wide. I want to cut a single 2.5 inch strip. Remember, cut once. Measure twice at one, two, three, four, five. That seems a little bit scary, but we have a 2.5 inch piece left here because I will need four squares. And if I use the rest of it on something else, that will be fine, too. So now we have four little squares here. Because we are doing the reef, we need to cut a piece that is going to serve as the bow up top. However, you want to decide on what your bow color is going to be. I've decided on the red and white stripe that I've used before. This has to be 22.5 inch squares, and I'm measuring to see how wide this fabric is. And with these, we're going to move a little bit quicker. And then that way, you can see that you really can use a 2.5 inch strip of fabric or you can use ten inch square and get most of your cuts out of it. For the very center to begin our waf is our background fabric, and that's what makes this reef block different is you will actually begin with your background fabric. 25 inch squares. One will be the center of the reef, what we begin with the background, and we will build out from this background fabric. The next one, we are going to cut this into four, so we will have four, 2.5 inch squares. We have our four, 2.5 inch squares. Now we're ready to start making our reef block. Start making our reef, we need to snowball in our four corners with our 1.5 inch square. So we are going to put our right sides together on these four corners, and we're going to snowball those, and this will blend in to our reef. What I always recommend is go ahead and put your ruler on there and draw a line so that you are snowballing in the right direction. So we need this one to go from left to right on both the top and the bottom. I basically just lay my ruler there and I put me a small mark that way when I get to the machine, it's a lot easier to follow. And the same thing here, we're going to go from right to bottom left. And if you pre mark those, it helps you to keep your vertical mind straight so that you don't get off on your lines, and all you have to do is sew right down on that line. Now, this one is rather small because it's an inch and a half square. When you got to your sewing machine, you can minimize your stitch to a two millimeter versus a 2.5. Stick. That is really, really helpful and beneficial when you're doing these really small little pieces, helps tack them in so they don't stretch out as far and they stay in place. Okay, so we have sewn directly down on our line. And remember, when you get your ruler, go to your quarter inch mark and lay that quarter inch mark directly down on your seam and then that way you ensure that you've allowed that quarter of an inch seam allowance, cut off the difference and you'll go around to all four sides and once you have those cut off, you need to press them open and outward. That's looking pretty snazzy, and we have those pressed backwards. Create our bob. Let's set this piece aside. This is our main body piece, and we're going to bring forth our two pieces that are 2.5 inch squares that we selected for our bow, and we're going to take our main body fabric that is the 2.5 inch wide by 5 " long. We are once again going to make the easiest flying geese in the world. This is fast and easy. It's real important that we select one at a time. Here's another thing to bear in mind. Whichever way if you have a striped fabric such as what I am using, you need to decide which direction you want it to flow if you want it to move vertically or if you desire to flow horizontally. Now, one way that you can do that is you can go ahead and you can press this. Put a little roll on that, that can also serve as your sew line whenever you snowball this on. Can stage your bow and see which direction you want those flowing. It's got the bows stripes running in a horizontal manner to where the stripes are flowing and Direction. And this is just a way that you can stage it. Take and lay fabric down, and we want to do these one at a time. Most of the time, these overlap when you're doing pretty much like a flying geese. And I will draw my line on here and I'll sew this one on first. And since I know that I want my stripes running in this direction, while I have this one lined down here, I'm going to go ahead and put my line on it, and that will just keep my right brain from getting vertically challenged by having my mark there already. While we have this here because this is a larger piece, take advantage of it and use your half inch mark, lay your half inch mark line that we created, and we're going to draw another line. When we get to the sewing machine, we are going to sew directly down on this line and on this line. So we have that one. And let's go ahead and lay it back here with our cuarven inch seam allowance right directly on that seam. We're going to just cut off this side that we've already given a quarter inch seam allowance because we measured a half inch over. Now we can press this open and press this open. That's looking pretty snazzy here is our little mini one. We can put that aside and save it. Now we need to add this one, sometimes whenever you're doing these, it overlaps. That's why you want to do one set at a time, it takes the guesswork out of making your flying geese and it definitely reduces stress and any kind of difficulty. What's wonderful about this is even though that's going to intersect right there, when you get to your sewing machine, you might be better off to begin at this end that doesn't have fabric towards you and I'm going to sew down on these two lines. Again, using our quarter inch mark right on that seam allowance. That looks just beautiful. I'm very pleased with how that flying geese looks. And as you can see, even with those seams overlapping, they are perfect. No problem at all. Easiest, most stress free flying geese you can ever make. Let's bring forth this original piece that has our background in it, and we're going to go ahead and sew this putting right sides together and sew straight across. That looks good. What we want to do now is we want to iron this towards the dark side. When we set it down, we want to press this upward so that that seam so that darker fabric is not reflecting underneath my white. We can now sew other five inch by 2.5 inch piece to the bottom. We're just going to lay that there and sew right down. I've attached and press this down. Have these at 9 " that will be going up the side. But to truly make this look like a reef, we need to snowball in our corners. So we're going to bring forth our 42.5 inch squares that are a background fabric. And what we need to do on each piece is we have got to place one at the top, right sides together, and we're going to also put a piece down here at the bottom. You can actually snowball these in the same direction because one is going to be turned this way and the other one's going to be turned this way. Keep our vertical mind, our right creative mind from getting messed up, we're going to snowball these in one at a time. This side needs to go from left to right, bottom. Once again, I'm going to go over a half an inch seam allowance and draw a line because I can make that into a small half square triangle. This one is going to go from the upper right to the lower left. Draw me a line. Remember I told you this side, we're going to be turning to the left. You can actually lay these lines down identical to what we have on this side. It will work the same way. Now, this is where we have to pay attention. If you turn this, this is going to be folded back, and there's your line. So you see what's happening there. I will not matter. You can do them identical or you can lay them just the way they're going to go to the reef because whenever we sew that and we press that back, this side will be attached to the left, this side will be attached to the right. So we have these song, and we're going to do the same thing as we have done before. We're going to allow quarter of an inch seam by laying our quarant marking on the actual song line, trim off our little squares. We can move rather fast on this because now we're getting pretty good at doing become commonplace and we're used to it. We've done it a few times. We can press those backs when we go to our iron after we get these cut off. These are looking really, really nice, very easy snowballed. The larger the better, right? And here's our four little mini half squares. And this will be neat for some other projects or maybe even this quilt. So we'll set these aside. Now the easy part comes. We just basically now have to add these on to the sides. So we just need to sew and attach these putting our right side together. We'll see how well we did. Here is our adorable little quilt block of our reef now we just basically need to square this up and make it less wonky looking. With all the song parts, sometimes they get a little bit warped looking. I basically am using my mate to find a square of this and I want to even as possible. I want to center this point of the reef, the bow because that's really truly the center of this particular block. Anything beyond that point what I will take off because once again, I am centering this based on my bow and I want to do the same thing to the bottom here. Once again, I'm going to find me. I'm going to center my bow on this line here and it's so important to square these up when you are freshly making them. That way you can see what you should or shouldn't take off. Then that way, if you need to square it up and make it smaller or larger and see that right there to me is preferably to come off rather than to stay on because it's a quarter and not quite a half, and that would make a huge difference whenever I go to set my blocks in the finished block here, 8.5 by 8.5 inch. These can be taken, changed up, made with different bows, and even different fabric, and you can make an entire quilt just out of this one block. 14. How to Make Quick 8 Half Square Triangles: We are going to make some quick eight can make them really, really fast, one of the same fabric to adjoin to each one of my five inch squares so that you can see we want our right side facings. We want these to be a little bit smaller. We're actually going to do eight on each one of these and this is how you do it. We are first going to lay our ruler here and draw a line through the center diagonally from and we are going to sew a seam on each side of that line when we take it to the machine. And uniquely enough, when we do this, the way that we cut it, it will turn into eight half triangles. So once again, I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing that to both of these sets. This will give you some color differential, and you will have some that will have both those colors. So we're going to go to the machine and we're going to sew a quarter and on each side of these lines, you can place your foot beside this line and so that quarter inch seam, flip it around and come back down. You'll do the same thing on that side and the same thing to this square. All right, so that you can see this up close. You can see my stitching pattern is a quarter of an inch on each side of that line. Now, the easiest way to do this is you're going to use your rule, and we're going to cut this first cut we're going to make is right down through the center, the halfway mark of this square. Since this is 5 ", you can use your ruler and go over 2.5 " and you know you're in the center, we're going to cut it. First, this direction. Now we're going to turn it and we're going to cut it right down the center. The next cut we're going to do is diagonal as we drew our line. Right through the intersections there, and then we're going to do the same thing this direction on the diagonal, and this is going to create for us eight half square triangles. They just call the quick eight because you end up with eight of these beautiful half square triangles. Now, let's go to the ironing board, and let's press these open, pressing towards the dark side. You'll do the other square the very same way. Now we have all of our triangles iron open, and they are just beautiful. You can see all these contrasting colors you got to silver and gold going in these particular fabric. 15. Fast Square Up 4 n 1 Tool: Here's the trick. You can use these just as they are. The other thing is this tool right here is a half square four and one triangle ruler, read it really well and see it really good. It has all of your half measurements. It has your whole measurements and your half measurements in the same ruler. It also has the line that we drew. You can actually use this little slit here, lay it on the center of your square, and you can draw the line. There are more than one way to use this particular triangle. You generally want to square your triangles up when they're closed, but with this ruler, you can do them open or close, and I will show you right here, it has the lines. You could do it while it's closed or you can do it while it's open. That's what's unique about this particular squaring triangle is that you have the potential to do it both ways. Now, when you square up, this is the thing you got to keep in mind. If I measure this square, just like it is and discounting the dog ear, I am showing that that is a one and almost two inch square. It's about an inch and a half and it's actually over that mark, so you can decide if you want to take that difference off or not. If you're squaring these up to an inch and a half, then you can actually do that open or closed, and it's quite easy to follow. If I do this in the closed position, what I'm looking for when I put it on my square up ruler is we have our seam line and we can see our threads through this. If we put that on the inch and a half, seam line. You can see these little dots, little dashes. That's the actual sew line. You can see the overage on these little squares, and that is what you would be cutting. You always put the seam line on the line indicating the size that you are we're after the inch and a half and we would line that up and we would cut off anything over that mark, which is what I'm going to do to square up each one of these squares. I'm not going to do all of them on camera, but to give you the idea so that you see I'm lining that ruler up. Anything that's over that point once I put that dash onto that seam line is what I would be cutting off. So I'm going to make sure that my triangle is good and under that mark that my seam line is lined up before I cut it at all. This also has the grips on it so it does not slide around and squaring up this many small little squares and then trimmed we'll cut the dog ears off of it, right there again, with it open, you can see that it is at the 1.5 mark on the ruler. Now that triangle is completely squared up to an inch and a half. You can trim those little dog ears off. I do because it just makes it easier. I can see which one I have done and I can move on to all of them really quick. 16. Ornament Block 8 Pro Level Up: I Ornament block. Now we have our quick ads all squared up and our doll gears are removed. We need two rows of these. For example, Bn. You can lay them out any direction you want to go. You have to determine that. We need two rows that are four across. And like I said, you can play with these and shape them and design them to go any direction you want because this is your ornament. You may want some kind of pattern running to make them really, really neat looking and change it up and use some of one block and some of another and come up with all kinds of different patterns may see in your unique ornament that you build, and you can kind of lay them out and see which way you want to go. So the idea here is you can deviate and make different designs and get different flows going with it, the other four that you have leftover of each of your squares making a total of eight. This can give you option to make two ornament blocks. The great thing about half quarter square triangles is you can make all kinds of they become more and more beautiful and sophisticated with each time you lay them out and you'll just find yourself putting these little things together into puzzles and really playing with them. I'll go to the machine and I want to sew these together. Yes, you'll have to do them one at a time. But what you can do is if you take your cutting ruler and le them out just as you have them mat here on the map and then transport them over to your machine. That way, they stay in order and you don't get mixed up. This just makes a really easy carrying tray so that we keep everything in order. I'm going to sew together and I'll one tip that I wanted to share with you when you press your blocks open. If the top ones, iron those to the left the ones on the bottom, iron to the right. Seams will nest together. I'll show you. When you have them pressed that way, now I have all four sewn together and they are flowing to the left. One on the bottom, I have them pressed going to this will keep any kind of fabric pile going on and it actually will keep this from shifting whenever you go to put these two together without any issue because all these things will just nest together. All your blocks are squared up and they are pressed and equal in space. Now I can go to the machine and sew those together and they are just nested just perfectly. Here we are. We have all eight of them sewn together. And as you can see, these seams are just as flat as a flitter. And by pressing them that way, you don't have all this fabric piling, and it makes it really easy to quilt them and put together your block of brise. So sometimes, pressing your fabrics the right direction is essential to the outcome of a really nice sized block and everything really looking good. Now, by laying this on my mat, take my ruler. So we have a six and a quarter on this. So we need to cut our fabric on the sides here to make this a little bit longer before we add our top. And I think that will give it a nicer finish. So our blocks added together are 3.5 inch. Cut two pieces that are 2 " by 3.5 " long to go on each side. I'm just going to add min on and then trim off the difference. So we want to lay these right size together and sew one to each side. I've attached the fabric onto those little blocks. I'm going to cut off this difference before I press that open, and I'm going to line it up using this line as my guide together. So if yours is a little wonky, that's simply normal. And these extra pieces we can use in our scrap. Press this open and see what we've got. It's iron and by measurement, it looks like we have 9 " by adding that on. And that's exactly what I was going for. 9 ". Cut a strip of fabric to the top and to the bottom that is 2.5 " wide by 9 " long. So now let's go to the machine. Let's sew this one to the bottom, and let's sew this one to the top. Looks really, really nice. So here are four and once again, and we're just going to draw a line from corner to corner on these squares so that when we're at the machine, we don't even have to think about it. We can just sew right down that line. We're going to lay our square up top, and we're going to sew from corner to corner, starting at the upper right down to the lower left. On this side, we will do the opposite. We will start at the upper left and sew down to the right. And you can use a pin to just keep those there until you get to the machine. This one, we will do the opposite. We will sew from the left down to the right. We will make sure that we sew our square from the upper right to the lower left. And it's always best to lay this out before you get to the machine and look at it and just give it a look over and make sure that it looks like the angles are going in the right direction for your snowball. Corners snowball. We're going to take our ruler, we are going to lay our quarter of an inch marking right on top of that seam and allow that quarter of an inch seam allowance. Cut off that little bit, and we'll do that all four corners. I only take a second, but make sure you allow that quarter of an inch seam allowance. So let's press those our ornament block is looking really nice. To complete our ornament, we need to put a hanger up here. And if we measure these distance, we know that this is 9 " long. To make this look right, we need at least inch and a half by 3.5 " long. I've selected black. Gray or silver would look good as the hanger. We need to cut these pieces of our background fabric an inch and a half by three and a quarter inches long is attached one to the left and one to the right and press that open. Created our top. We can attach this to the top of our ornament now. So I'm just going to go to the machine, place these two together, and I'm going to sew my top. To create a little bit more definition and hanger uptop here, and we've already measured it. I have this little piece that is the stripe to make it look like a ribbon or a hanger, an inch and a half by 1 ". I'm going to leave that length on it. I can trim it. Two background pieces for either side at an inch and a half by 4.5 " piece for our hanger. You could do that in black or you could do that in a stripe, maybe some leftover pieces. Everything gets used. Nothing goes to waste. I'm going to sew one to each side of this 1.5 inch strip. So my little topper is looking really cute. I'm going to trim off that little bit. It's overhung there. Sometimes it's easier to hang on to that little strip and just trim off the difference and attach this to the top of my ornament, right size together, and sew right across the top of that. So I'm going to leave this block at the 9.5 by 8.5 " size. It's just a beautiful ornament block. It really turned out good. I think adding an extra one of these into the quilt would be a grand idea then that we had all of our leftover half quarter inch triangles and you can make a different block with those. That's just another way to get two of these ornament blocks and use all of your squares. 17. Ornament Block 9 Use Quick 8 HST: Since we now know what all our cuts are for the ornament block, let's make another ornament block. The pattern I elected this time is to put the colors on the outside, and these ornament pieces will be attached on the outer extremity. That way, the pattern is really, really popping in the center. So I'm going to sew this first row together and this second row together. And remember, you can use your cutting ruler as the tray to transport your squares over to the sew machine to keep them in order. And then that way is just really easy so that you don't get mixed up. Just as before, when I did my top row, I had told you and encouraged you to press those all to the left at the top. The top is flowing to the left and then to press your seams to the bottom to the right. That way, when you go to sew these down, these seams will nest together. Any problem. You can just line those up because those have already been squared lays down when it goes under the machine. That looks really nice. As you can see, all that is just pressed down, very flat, very nice, and that keeps from the fabric piling up. Just light down and it goes through my quilt machine to spine and I have no problem now the side pieces here, they are two inch by 3.5 inch, which is the length of these blocks sewn together because they're inch and a half and whenever they were sewn together, they ended up being a 3.5 inch section. We did two inch wide by 3.5 inch long strip. These have not been sized down, but as I did before, I will sew one to this side, and then I will sew the other one to this side. Once I sewn them on, I will trim that off. I've got those sewn on, and before I iron them open, I'm going to cut off anything beyond that line and just making sure it's lined up on my mat here, smooth transition. So this is just what was left over where I had sewn that piece on. Hang on to all your square. That looks fantastic. So here is another thing that I want to point out. If you notice my ornaments on this particular fabric are flowing downward. You want to pay attention to that. Now, these in the square is going to give it some definition and some contrast because of that flowing, but it's not enough to even be notable. I am noticing it because it's small in this production and I can show really easily. But it doesn't take away from the form or anything. But on these, this would show up very loudly and proudly if it was not laid out correctly. Pay attention to the flow your pattern on your fabric. On the small half quarter triangles, they're only an inch and a half and once sewn together, there's not a whole lot. We really want these colors flow. That's just something to also be aware of. This one is, of course, these stripes and they're very bright, and if you stare at them too long, they'll mess with your eye. As you see, there's just a little bit of difference hanging over, and that's no problem. There again, we have that opportunity to square up. W I is when this is going on and I know these are the exact cuts and measurements of the previous one. I'm going to use this as my ruling length, which is 9 ". Then that way, this one can stand any kind of trim off. But before I trim it, I will use that squaring it up at the end once I put everything together. So unless it's confusing for me, I'll leave it as it is until I get to that final step. Now, I'm just going to eyeball this and center it. I can sew that top down across there, and I'm going to do this one the same way. Now I'm going to sew top and the bottom on those pieces on, and I just want to make sure it's staying in that nine inch mark, and this line is straight. And now I can find my balancing part, and I'm just going to take off that little bit of edge that's line over here from that previous fabric. And then the same over here. I can actually use my striped fabric as my guide. Snowballed are squares into the corners. These are 1.5 inch squares, and I am able to lie them there, and we are going to draw a line on them because when I get to the sewing machine, I do not even have to think about it. My brain does not have to calculate. I can actually just sew down the line. And when I lay them on the ornament, it helps me to be able to see which way they need to flow. You can basically draw a line on each one of them and then place them on the fabric if that's easier. Whatever your brain can do and if you become vertically challenged, this is an easy way to do it so that you can see it and you don't even have to think about it. You can actually go, Oh, yes, that goes that way and this one will go this way. That just keeps me in the straight, keeps my brain thinking in the right direction. I'll just put a pin there just long enough to hold it until I can get to the machine. We're going to use our quarter inch mark and we're going to lay that actually on the seam line so that we ensure that we allow that quarter inch seam allowance. When we iron our corners back, press our nice little squares into place. Now it is really starting to take our top here is that a 3.5 inch by inch and a half was the perfect fit for the center. But we needed our side pieces, so we had to cut those at 3.5 as well, and 1.5 " tall for both sides. So I already have those cut, and of course, I'll go to the machine. I'll sew one on one side, and then now I'll have to move that down the way and sew the other one to the other side. Topper is now 9 ", and I'm just going to attach it to the very top of the ornament, sew that across. I meant to also say this. As you know, these are our center squares, and if you're worried about centering that piece, let's say yours might be a little extra long and you need to trim it off or something. Just consider the lines here is being lined up in the center area to those two squares. You can just even if you slide it up slightly with your hands and then flip it over, it's pretty much going to be in the center. But that's just a way that you can use the lines of barrier that you already have as your center and then you have it in the middle this ornament is coming together really, really fast. Now remember, you do have this little sway going, but it doesn't affect your sew line at all. Just keep it straight as you possibly can because of those small pieces. So the next smaller piece that's the challenge is 1 " by 1.5 inch strip, and on each side of it, we need to sew a 1.5 inch by 4.5 inch background piece. I'll attach these to the little 1 " piece. Attached to the slimmer pieces, I just take my ruler and trim it off. Like I said, sometimes just that little scrap piece of fabric can be helpful to leave it a little bit long ever go to put it on there, just so you don't have any trouble with it. So machines will eat that little tiny piece, and have a little length on it when it goes in the machine helps versus her. Hey, girl to the top here. So I'll put those right sides together and sew that strip on. Here we have our ornament block. It is just gorgeous. Even with the stripes and the pattern is enough to keep it from bothering the eyes and making your eyes twitch back and forth. Now I'm just going to see if this means squaring up any. We have our nine by 8.5 inch ornament block. When you actually take some of that width off of this block, it actually enhances it and complements it makes it look better. It doesn't look so oblong and stretched. It looks more square and boxed like a true ornament. 18. Block 10 Music Note Pattern Corrections: So you should have a total of 13 pieces cut out. Whenever you pre cut your fabrics, you can label them with a number or a letter. Sometimes when you're just doing a single block, you can do them by size, and I have all of mine stacked as they are in width or length by size. Then I have my main fabrics and I know I'm going to start with this one, so I'll set these aside. The first thing that we need to do is some prep work. Because these will have angle and are going to be used as a snowball, but they're actually going to have part of the flare we're going to go ahead and pre draw a line to simplify this so that when we get ready to snowball these onto the pieces, we'll already have our line drawn. Basically, we only want to draw that angle from one side to the other, and we're just going to draw a line from corner to corner on all of these squares. That way, when we join it to the fabric, we're going to be snowballing. We'll already have our line to sew upon, and it just moves that along a lot faster, and this just helps us from really, truly being less confused and not angrily challenged whenever we get to the sew machine. That prep work done in advance. For the note block, have to prepare this to be the note itself. We are going to need three of our 1.5 inch squares. We're going to need our main body piece, which is 3.5 by 4.5. You want to make sure that the 4.5 is running horizontal and the 3.5 is running vertical. We're going to lay one in the lower right hand corner. This is going to make our note form, and we're going to go ahead and pin it in place right sized together because we've already drawn our lines on our squares. The next one is going to be in the lower left hand corner, and the next one is going to be in the upper left hand corner. When we do the Make sure they're turned correctly. This one is turned correctly. This one is not. I need this one to where it is flowing, be sewn from the upper right handcorn to the lower left. This one be sewn from the upper left to the lower right. Start at the upper right and sew to the lower left. Just another note, make sure that when you sew this little square on, you minimize your sewing stitch. To 2 millimeters. The shorter the stitch, the better this will harness in place and keep it from getting off track with you and be more precise. Use my quarter of an inch marking. Lay that directly down on the actual sewn line, and that will give 1 " seam allowance. Cut off the difference. Do that to all three corners, and it only takes a jiffy. You can use a pair of scissors if you like. It works just the same. Get to the ironing board and press these back. That looks pretty sharp. H our body already snowball. Let's go ahead and do our next prepping since we're already working with squares. You want to bring down your 1.5 inch by three inch pieces, and this one is super easy as well. All we have to do on these because we have our line drawn already is we're going to lay that 1.5 inch square on the right side of those strips, and we need that line to flow from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner. That's exactly the way we are going to snowball the very sides of this piece of fabric, and we're just this till we get it to the machine, and so right down on our draw line. Now, we've accomplished that. Once again, we're going to do the same thing and pay attention that you lay these down so you don't get turned around, you don't get confused and cut the wrong half. We need to cut this upper half. So what I do is I turn them to where they are kind of facing me. I once again lay that quarter of an inch mark right on that scene line, and I cut off the difference. And then I do the same thing over here, and then I will press these open. We'll have our little flares for our music note made. Those look really nice. And remember, the key is to press. Instead of ironing, you want to heat set your stitches that lets those be absorbed by the fabric by sinking in because it's cotton fabric, cotton thread, helps those fibers spread out, and then they relax. Then push that back and set the iron down on it. And that way you get these nice press. And the next step that we're going to do is we're going to start building out these pieces because all we have to do is take the inch and a half by three inch long background we are going to sew these three together. That's real simple. I'll take and put these right sides together and I will stitch that one down. I will press it open, and then I will lay this one right sides together, and sew it down. We want to do it so that these flares ones at the top and ones at the bottom. When you go to press this open, press these going up the ones on the right, we're going to press anything on the left, we're going to press down and that will just help if any seams come together and meet each other, they will nestle. Things start really speeding up now. We want to bring down our three by 5.5 inch background strip and we want to attach these pieces to it. We're just going to put these right sides together and stitch across here. That completes our left side and you want to press all these seams flowing upward. Now the next step is we are going to finish out our body, and this is super simple because we only have these three pieces left. We're going to take our by 3.5 inch piece. We're going to sew it on to the left side of our music notes. Right sides together, and we'll sew right down the side. Then with this longer piece, which is our five by 5.5, we are going to take our 1.5 inch strip by 5.5 " and we're going to attach it to the right side of this square and sew it right down the side there. Press this side open. This is our five by 5.5 inch and this one is our two by inch. And laying them here, I can easily see that the original pattern instruction is off half of an inch right here. This is a whole half an inch. So in the original cuttings where we pre cut these ahead of time, we can reduce this particular cut here to an inch and a half wide by 3.5 " long, and it would button up just perfect equal to this size. I did verify the pattern, and we cut ours directly by that pattern, and as you can see, is all of a half inch different. But no worries. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and attach these two pieces together. We can cut off any extra when we square our block. For the time being, we just need to sew across that line. That is a change we will make in our cut, and I will change that to reflect 1.5 by 3.5. We have to do now is sew this strip to this side, we're just going to lay those right sides together and sew right down the side there. Another thing is with my seams running up this way, I will start sewing it under the machine. I will actually take my fabric and light that away and sew it down with this so that way the stay pressed down, go right up under that needle just as smooth as can be with no problem. Music note turned down absolutely beautiful. At this point, I have centered my music note on my map, and I am squaring it up. The best way to square it up is to find you a center on your map and lay it there and turn it and make any adjustments so that it's sitting straight and looks in proportion. That's how you discover something. You will be following a pattern and then you'll find that the actual block on one measurement might be off. Then that way, as we work it out, we know we can make that change in the final cut. That is a great way of equaling this out. At this point, we have an eight inch wide by 8.5 " tall block for the music. 19. Whole Note Inspired Piecing Bl 11: To make a whole music note to predecess after we've made our half note. All you'll need is your background fabric and then select a fabric that is of a solid color that's going to be the body of your actual music note. To begin our full note block, we're going to do our prep work because we've got to snowball in three of the corner these squares. So we have our inch and a half. We're going to draw a diagonal line on each one of these squares and just select one side, and from corner to corner, take your ruler, light there, and you can draw your line, and it takes the guessword out of it, and your eyes don't even have to think, they can just focus, and you're going to sew on that line. One will go here and be sewn from the upper right hand corner to the lower left hand corner. You'll do the same on this note as well. You'll just draw your line, and that will keep you from being angrily challenged whenever you go to sew, and you'll already have those in place. Things to note. Whenever you go to the machine, reduce your sewing stitch to 2 millimeters versus 2.5. That'll help harness this stitch into place and less probability of it pulling loose while you're working with it. Also, it helps you to be a little more accurate in sewing your line. So when you place your foot down, you can center it and just stitch right on the line. It will flow a whole lot faster and just putting the pin in there so that you can transport it from the cutting mat to the machine, anything to lessen the stress. This just speeds things up. With our snowballs in place, before we press them open, we're going to put our quarter of an inch onto that seam and lay it right on the seam line and just cut off the difference before we press these open. That way, our seam allowance is already allowed. So now we need to build out the center of our music notes. And we have our 1.5 by 3.5 inch strips of our actual main color and one of our background. We're going to sew these three together, put our right see together, and sew this one, and then we will take this one, sew it to the other side, and press it open. And that will be our center bars. To get this set of bars, the right amount of distance between the notes that will be down here, we need to add another 1.5 by 3.5 inch strip to the bottom here. Let's attach this inch and a half strip and to sew it two right sets together, stitch across there. Now when you create these middle bars, make sure that you press these up so that way anything on the right of this, if it has a seam, you can press it down and anything on the left, you can press down. Now we need to attach 1.5 inch wide. By 4.5 inch strip because this section is 4.5 " long. So I'm going to take it to the machine, and I'm going to lay these right sides together, and I'm going to attach that. So we've connected one side of the arm for our note, and this one on the right will go here because our block here is 3.5 ", and the space difference is a 1 " opening, half inch seam allowance, so an inch and a half. 3.5 and listen to that when we do our quilting. So I am going to lay these right sides together and stitch down the side here and press it back. So this is looking excellent. Now we can attach the right side of the whole note to our bars. So we're just going to go to the machine. We're going to put these right sides together and stitch across here. Now I've got that press down. It's looking really, really good on the right side. So down here at the bottom, we need to add an inch and a half 4.5 inch strip. I attach this to the bottom side of my block, and then I will trim off the difference once I've attached this. I've sewn that on, and there again, when you've got your fabrics and they're shifting and so forth, that is exactly half an inch, but it never hurts to somehow just sew it on and then trim off that little bit. I can press this open, and that should finish up our right side of our note. To do the left side of our music note, we will need a background piece that is 2.5 " by 5.5 " long. We will need a main fabric that is 1.5 " wide, by 5.5 " long, and then of course, we'll have our music note. We need to go to the machine, and we need to sew this 5.5 inch by 1.5 inch to the right side of our 2.5 inch by 5.5 inch strip. So we'll just sew right down the side here. Now that we have that pressed open, we can now attach our note to the bottom of it, and we'll just lay these right sides together and sew them right across there. So now the final step is to lay these two pieces together and sew right down the side, attaching them. We did a fantastic job of making our very own full music note. This was without a pattern and we just basically used our first half note as a map to go by that helped establish the outer boundaries and helped us to make our own music note. Now we just need to square up our music note block. And get a final measure. We have a 7.5 inch by 8.5 inch tall block, and we're just going to square up anything that looks awkward or out of place there. And as you can see on the back here, this more narrow type of seams, we press inward and lay them in close so that that whole piece will show off. You'll get more exposure of it. Then as you can see, all of these were pressed upward and these were pressed downward on the left side. Then that way, if you do happen to have any seams that intersect, they will nestle up nice and it'll keep your block from getting swishy, swashi or crooked or full music note. 20. Envelope Block 12 Quick Makes: The envelope block. And this is a simple block to make. You're going to love it. We're going to make a couple. You will need five inch squares to make your envelope. You will need one that's going to serve as the fly and one that's going to serve as the body. Because one square is going to get us four half square triangles, when we sew these two together, we will have three of one and one of another. So in other words, we want to make two sets. Well, all we're going to do is take these 25 inch squares. So laying our right sides facing each other. We're going to sew all the way around both of these squares. To make or small have square triangles. We have a seam all the way around the outer perimeter. I have my rotating mat here. This is a FISCs. You can usually find these at Walmart and different places or online. We're going to cut them from corner to corner. I'm just laying my ruler here from corner to corner, using my rotary cutter, and I'm just going straight across. I'm going to now turn this and do the same thing to the other side corner to corner. Now we have four half square triangle and I will do this one the same. Now, before we press these open because we are using this in our quilt. We're going to square these up. We want them squared up to 3 ". Now, if you are doing that, you can, of course, use your ruler, and you can just light there at your three inch mark and square it up that away. You see here, this one is almost a quarter of an inch over being 3 " squared up by the ruler. So, of course, you would just line up your ruler. You could cut those sides, and then of course, you would turn your square and do this side the same way. Lay it in your three by three mark and cut off the difference. If you have a square up ruler, you would use the 2.5 inch mark. You do have it where you can open them up and square them up on the three inch mark. When you do it on the fold, you're going to be going by these white triangles over here. You're going to follow the dotted line. This 2.5 inch mark is where I would be lining mine up to. When you do it folded, you accomplish all four sides at one time, and it's just easier. That's why having a square up tool is very handy. Now when you have it folded, remember, you're going to go by the white dotted line all on that triangle. So you would just slide this seam, your seam line right there, up to the 2.5 inch mark when it's laying down, and you'll be able to trim all four sides at one time because it's folded. And then as far as the dog ears, trim those off as you're going along. And when I do that, I know that one has been squared up and I can move along really, really quick. So there's two ways that you can square up these to 3 " open to lay out seams on your rulers so that you do not have to even think about it. So if that is a seam that you're using the most common, then you would just place this tape on there, and it just helps that to show up more and you can put these on your rulers whenever you're using them. You can put it right on the line or you can just cover the line. When you're looking at it, you can see it a lot better and they have different colors. When you use this tape, you do want to trim it off next to the ruler itself. You don't want to have that extra folded over per se. You'd be much better off to make sure that it's trimmed up to the size of your actual ruler. Then that way you can easily find the seam line that you're working on. Square triangle squared up to 3 ". This is how you want to lay them. You're going to take two and bring them together. Depending on which color you're going for. Now, I'm going to turn this one to where that dark is the showy. You're going to add a third one, and now you have your envelope. And the neat thing is, you're going to turn this one the opposite way as though the envelope is open. And then, of course, you can make a secondary because we did our matching fabric, and you can do the opposite. You can put the lighter color in towards you and then use the dark one as the flap coming in and the other one going outward. Then you have two different envelopes, and you can do a mix and match or make additional ones simply by selecting either a background color with a very prominent color that you want to show up or like I did, selecting two separate fabric to put together. And every time you sew the two, five inch squares together and cut them on a diagonal, you're going to end up with four half square triangles and you can make several envelope. We have two made that will go in our quilt. We need to make one more and before we go any further on these, we want to sew these together. So we'll take the top ones and sew and the bottom ones. So whenever you iron these, we're going to press this seam open to the left, and we're going to press this seam open to the right. The reason why is when we bring these two together, these seams will nest together right here in the center, and you'll get no argument with it going underneath that sewing machine, and it'll make it easy when you go to quilting it, you won't have this fabric pile with these two facing each other, also across here and press open. Now our envelopes are just looking absolutely beautiful. And when these have a background fabric going around them, they will really, really pop and you'll see them even better. So if you just lay them singly, you can see how gorgeous they are. 21. Place on POINT Block Panel: I've made an extra envelope with these two on the right side and one on the left side, and they're going to be laying sideways. I wanted to place this one on point, exactly a five and a quarter square with this block. We want to put it on point, and that is easy to accomplish. Take one of our background fabrics that are 5 " wide. Need two of them because we need to put sides on all four sides of this block. Take five inch square. This is what you got to keep in mind. This is five and a quarter. Whenever you measure the halfway mark of a five inch square, which is what we began with, it's going to be 7 " stretch. Take two of these are going to cut them on the diagonal and turn them into four. Laying my ruler from corner to corner. Now we four pieces. You want to do two sides first because the others will overlap. To make this easier, we have a center point on this particular block. Sometimes that is not the case when you're doing certain blocks, but to make it easier, we're just going to handfold and finger press that so that we have this little crease and we can line it up right here on the side, and we're going to stitch that down. Need to do the other side as well, let me show you this one, you can actually see that it is centered and that that crease is laying right in the center point of the block. But if it were not and you did not have that crease, you could fold fingerpress it just like we're doing these triangles, and you can also do this. Whenever you're laying it on there and you look at it, you'll see this perfect square form right there in the center where those two intersect. You know you have it centered and that it's where it needs to be. So let's sew these sides down. I have those pressed open. As you can see, we're going to have overlap, and that's exactly what we want. It's important that we have that overlap. Let's take our other two and we are also going to fold them and give them a little bit of a finger press, find our center, and we're going to line that up. When we sew these on, we want them to overlap our previous ones and they'll go right over that edge to just sew all the way across and you'll do the same on this side. Remember, if you're looking for that intersection of that perfect square and knowing that you're right in the center because we have this seam running in the center, we can easily lay it in there and it lines up. Let's sew both these sides on. Now before we move forward, let's go ahead and clip off these dog ear. You don't have to, but I think it looks a lot neater and it takes that pile and just lessens how much is stuck under there and just clip those off. You can use your scissors or your rotary cutter. Now let's press these open. And here we are. It looks perfect, and it's just beautiful. This can real quickly make this five and a quarter square now an eight inch square, if I'm not mistaken, let's measure it real quick and find out. Yes, we have 8 " and this, of course, is 8 ". Now we do need to square this up because we're going to be attaching the other blocks to it. When we measure that out, we know we need an inch and a half by 5.5 inch strips. We need to cut four of those and attach those to the top and bottom of these outer squares. We can now just sew one to the top and one to the bottom. Be mindful of which way your envelope is turned and making sure that you have your envelope turned the direction you want it to go. I know this one's going to be on my left and I want it angled towards the left, and this one will be on my right and I want it angle towards the right. So I know to sew my pieces on the top and bottom of them the way that they are laying. All right, so we have our side sewn on and pressed open, and it's the matter of attaching this to each side. So I'll take it to the machine and I will place my right one and sew it down, and then of course, I'll do my left and sew it down. We now have our first horizontal panel, and they basically call them panels because, well, we have more than one block sewn to it, and it's by 18 inch long. Panel. Once it goes over half a yard, you might as well call it a panel. You do have the option of doing the little envelope block separately or doing them on point for 8 " and mixing and matching and moving them about inside of your quilt. 22. Convert Paper Pattern to Traditional Blk: Always have a camera. We have to have our camera ready and I'm super excited to share this pattern with you because it is originally a paper pieced machine wilt pattern. The main piece of fabric, there is a 3.5 inch square is this centerpiece that is the shutter of the camera is going to depict how large this pattern gets. I say as a paper piece pattern, this is the original paper piecing pattern. You would generally print these off, and then you would sew your fabric in order using a little bit of glue, you turn it upside down to sew the stitches. But I'm going to show you how we're going to make the old fashioned quilt block way. And if we do it right, our camera should turn out about this size. As you can see, the shutter is the significant part of this pattern. And I'm going to show you how we can duplicate this using whatever fabric we've decided on. The great thing is you're going to find that a lot of these pieces are small enough to be scrap pieces, and so you can use some of your cutoffs that we've done in the previous block. Right here with my 3.5 inch square. I know that I've got to snowball in all four corners of this square to make a octagon shape, so to get our eight side to form the shutter of our camera. And I just have a scrap piece here because I want to show you how you can look at a picture and determine how much of an area we need to cover. If we only have a 3.5 inch area and we really need this to look like a camera shutter, then we've got to measure and decide how big of a snowball block. Now, this is going to be tedious and the most difficult part of it is the entire block. So I want you to hang onto your hat and know that you're being challenged and you can do it. I have confidence in you. I know you can. Now, if I only use a 1 " and I'm starting with a 1 " because I want to show you the difference. If I snowball with 1 " piece of fabric, the way that you can determine that by looking is you're going to take your ruler, and you're going to find your 1 " over, and you're going to find the 1 " down, and you line it up. That is how big of an area a 1 " square is going to cover if you snowball it in. As you can see, that's only leaving an inch and a half opening here because when you go to this side, once again, if we're just laying it from the 1 " to the 1 ", that is all the area we're going to cover of that corner, and that will give us a 1.5 inch opening. That means we also have to duplicate that on all four corners. This is how much it's going to cover, and that again is going to give us a 1.5 inch opening because we're dealing with a square. If we did this at an inch and a half, this is what you are looking at. Here's our 1.5 and here's our 1.5 mark. So if I line that up from the 1.5 over to the 1.5 down, it's taking up that much of an area. That snowball will take that whole corner. As you can see, by the time you did that on this side at 1.5 ", you're going to have this little bitty half inch opening, and that's not going to look very much like a shutter to a camera. It's just not going to form right. So we have to reduce that to 1 ". This is how you can decide how much of a snowball when you're working from a photo and trying to guestimate, how would that look? Your scrap fabric pieces or cutoffs are excellent for positioning and staging so that you can do your measuring and determine where to go from there. I had looked at the photograph and depicted that at least a 3.5 inch square was used in the center because of the shutter being good and round and having enough sew area to snowball the side, even though it is a paper photo quilt pattern. Are really, really tiny, but we can do it because it is so small. Now when we go to the sew machine, we are going to set our stitch pattern at two millimeter. A smaller stitch will ensure that these little pieces will stay anchored as we build out this block. We're just going to lower and lessen the size of our stitch. Now, I use a pen to mark mine so that when I get to the machine, all I have to do is sew on the line and it keeps me from getting vertically upside down or challenging to say the least and just draw you a small line from corner to just place a pin there long enough to hold that fabric. Let's go to the machine and let's sew directly on that line we drew. Our stitch down little squares, and it was a breeze. I had no problem whatsoever sewing those down because I had a little pen. Once I got a couple of stitches anchored in there, I slid my pen out and I was able to follow that Got to still allow a quarter of an inch seam lamp. This is my quarter of an inch on this ruler. And what I do is I lay that quarter of an inch marking directly on my seam line. I can see it underneath, and it is all but just a little nick of fabric coming off there. Now we need to press these open. And when I say press, push that back and then set your iron on it. Rather than taking the iron and pulling on it, just press it back with your fingers and then set the iron down on it. If you happen to have one of these little roll presses, these work just fine. You don't even have to iron it a lot of times when you use this little roll press. As you can see, you can real easily with the roll press, press those open. Our next step is pretty simple because we know this is 3.5 " long, but the width here is going to be 1.5 " wide that we are going to attach on both sides. We need two pieces that are 1.5 inch wide by 3.5 " long. Make sure that when you are using your rulers, whatever rulers you begin with on that block, use those rulers only throughout the build of your block because it will change from ruler to ruler. So it's really important to bear that in mind on your tools and equipment that whatever you begin with, make sure that's what you use the whole time. I will keep you from really, truly making a lot of mistake and the measurements will come out like they're supposed to. Take right side facing and sew this one onto the right side and do the same here with this piece, right sides together. So on the left side. Press towards the dark side and then do the same over here. Now the next step is we need an inch and a half wide by 5.5 " long for the top and for the bottom. That is simple easy math because all you have to do is count it on your cutting mat or you can use your ruler and light across there, whichever is easy for you to read, we already know that we used an inch and a half strip here, we're going to use the same fabric to do our top and our bottom. Now I have my 5.5 inch pieces, and I'm going to take it to the sewing machine, and I'm going to attach this one to the top and this one to the bottom. Now that is just looking absolutely gorgeous. So now we are really truly going to start taking form in developing this camera. We can see that they changed up the color of the body in the upper part to make it look more like, but vintage and nostalgia back in the 50s and 60s type of camera, got to snowball in these four corners to complete building out the body of the actual camera and completing the shutter area. Two pieces for the top to snowball and two pieces for the bottom snowball. And on this one, as you can see, they did black and they did gray for the original. And we are once again going to take measurements to determine how big these four snowballs need to be. Based on the photograph, when I look at it, I already see that it goes over top of the piece of fabric we have here, and it goes just over the corner of this fabric right here. I know that right here where these two lines intersect, that that has to come over this piece of fabric at least a quarter of an inch, and that is a proper depiction in this photograph that I need to cut my square at least an inch and a quarter or at this measurement, and then to give me my seam allowance grace, I need an inch and a half. So these four squares will need to be 1.5 inch squares to snowball in these four side. I'll show you what I mean. As I was showing you before, and I'm going to zoom this up. Whenever you take your ruler and you just lay it on your math inch, it is not going to cross these two intersected pieces of fabric. If I move that in by inch and a half, I have now crossed over and intersected these two pieces of fabric right here, this seam by a quarter of an inch for the top of a different color, and two inch and a half squares for the bottom. Use scrap fabric. Just know that when you're looking over your scraps, if you do two different colors, you're going to stay with that through this whole section up here and you're going to stay with that through this whole section down here and make sure that you look and see what you have if you're using scrap pieces or if you're using yardage or pre cups. This is a great pattern to use. Going to draw a line corner to corner so we don't get angrily challenged at the machine. That's these two pieces, and I know that I'm going to stay with that color for the bottom half of my camera. And we're going to go to the sew machine. We're going to sew directly down on that line and once again, reduce your stitch to two millimeter when you're doing something small like that, and I'll just help to anchor that little piece of fabric down a lot better for you. Lay our ruler on our sew line and allow a quarter of an inch seam allowance and trim off the difference. Press these open. And once again, press them. If you iron them, you're pulling the fabric. We don't want to do that. We want to just lay that back and set the iron down on it to press it backwards. The facing of our camera standing now really good now. Now, some ideas is if you have fussy cut a photograph or picture or printed on fabric or you maybe want to do iron on transfer to put a photograph or a picture or something that you'd like there, even a saying. It looks like we need to add this 14 A next. Order to square off and get our height of our camera. So now we're building upward, and we need to do our piece here. That looks like a 1 " piece by the finish here to get it this height, say, a 1 " piece, the width of this 5.5 inch square. This is the width of our block because you can see the width of a 1.5. This is what our 1.5 looks like. And so we can already see that that's a lot narrower than an inch and a half. I do have this 1 " strip, and that wouldn't look too bad on this camera. Now, it might change the personality of that block, and that's where you can make some decisions what you want to put across the top. Either way, you have to decide. This, you're going to use a scant quarter inch seam. You do not want to do an entire full quarter inch. If you do, there's really not going to be nothing left of this. It'll be a half an inch, and by the time you add another piece of fabric to it, it won't even be visible. So do a scant quarter inch seam on that piece of fabric. I'm just trimming off that little difference now that I've sewn that 1 " strip onto the top here. I'll press that back and see what we have. That looks really cute, really, really cute. Now, my guestimate is the reason why they put that little 1 " strip of fabric across the top there is to make this 6 " and make measuring and adding pieces to it a lot easier during the building of this paper pieced block. So if I take this ruler right here, it is exactly 6 ". Now they're building out the cap here. And that's the easy way is to keep going up till you get to that limit and then add the sides. Cut an inch and a half by 5.5 inch wide strip to go here. Go to the machine and attach this piece, and that's where we need to put. Anything that's part of the body down here, match up here, or you can go with a different color altogether. It's your camera, do as you like. Then since they are already blending in the background pieces, I know that I need to cut 21.5 inch squares to snowball this block in. That's this one and this one because we need the width of the existing strip and we need it to go far enough out that it looks like this hood so I went ahead and sewed that strip on. Now I have my 1.5 inch squares that are my background fabric, and I've already drawn a line from corner to corner so that you can see how that needs to be done in order to create the hood of our camera. And that's something to bear in mind as you build this out, you'll be able to look at. Is a more complex block because we are doing this from a sheet or a paper pattern that you do paper piecing on a machine with. And we are also using very small blocks to snowball in to create our shapes. Additionally, we are discovering how we can measure and determine how much of a snowball is needed for each section. As it is, it's a more complex pattern, and that just makes it easier for you to adjust to doing that. So let's snowball these in. We're going to go to the machine, and we're going to sew directly down on that drawn line on a quarter inch seam allowance. Remember, lessen your stitch to two millimeter when you're doing something small like that. Keep the fabric anchored in place. Well, lay our quarter inch seam allowance on our seam line now, don't always trust your drawn line if it's not exact, but your seam line. Cut off the difference. Now we're going to start building our side. This is really easy. I want to show you how easy this is. As you see here in the photograph, this piece of fabric, intersects in the corner right here. That's on both sides. We know the dark pieces are going to be the length of this point to the bottom. If I lay my ruler there and I measure that, that's 4 " of our darker fabric that is making part of the body. Now, the upper part on the right side is going to change color. We need to pick a color for the flashbll. The right side is going to get a little more complicated because we need a half inch seam allowance and a half inch seam allowance. This is what we're going to do. We know that this area is 4 ". From here to here. If we look at the picture, we know this area where it's coming together here is an inch and a half. That's pretty easy. We know that to get to this corner, where the flash bulb is an inch and a half. All we need is the difference between these two sections, which should be 2 " or so. It is from the corner to this corner. Yes, we have a half inch up here. We need a 4.5 inch strip, a two inch background fabric or the white, whichever we choose for this section. And then we need an inch and a half piece for our flash bulb. So if we allow that stitch allowance, we'll have our 4.5 here, we'll have our two inch here, and we'll have our inch and a half here, and it should come out right. I will measure twice to be sure. So now I've cut out my pieces. Remember, these are 2 " wide. This one's 4.5 " long. This is 2 " by two inch square, and this one is a 1.5 by two inch. I'm going to sew these together. I am going to do a scant quarter inch seam allowance. I'll sew this one first, and then once I put it together, I will then attach this one to the top of it, and so how smart are we have our seven inch strip that we need to attach here. As you notice, I press these downward because I have wider fabric in a downward flow. When I press these, I press these upward in the center of the block. That way, if there happened to be any kind of stitching that needs to nest up such as this intersection and this intersection, along with this intersection, they should nest together real easily and I'll be able to sew straight down. Now let's focus on the left side of our camera now that we've got our right side built out. As you can see, our measurements for the left side of our camera are identical to the ones on our right side. We need a 4.5 by two inch of our dark fabric, a two inch by two inch piece for upper camera fabric, and then 1.5 by two background fabric. Just in case you did yours the opposite, it still will look beautiful. You could have your flash on the opposite side and put your background fabric on the right side. As before, we're just going to sew these three together. Now, once again, I press those scenes down should nest up just right on this side. Camera truly looks like a camera. I cut two pieces to go down the sides. This is 7 " long and I'm going to cut it an inch and a half wide. We will sew these one on this side, sew right down and we'll attach this one to this side. Now all we have to do is add a 2.5 inch strip that's 10.5 " long. We need to cut two of those, one for the top, one for the bottom. Easy measurement, 10.5 mark. As before, we'll attach to the top. Well attach this one right down here at the bottom. Block, all of 10.5 " wide and 11 " long. 23. Advance Skills Use Scrap Fabrics Orphan Sq: The next block is the mug block. As you see, I have a variation of fabrics here because you want your mug to be colorful and decorative and go along with the winter holiday. This is excellent to use a lot of your cutoffs and excess scrap strips that are still large but beneficial and have that variety of colors. You can also narrate a shape out of half quarter inch squares or model something that you like a picture. Maybe you're using a print that has a photo on it that you wish to fuzzy cut, and this is an excellent block to do that with. Let's get started making the mug block, you will be using a great deal of 1.5 inch strips in this particular block. The very first thing we want to make is the handle for our mug. To make the handle, we need to pick one of our fabrics and you can use two like I'm going to or you can use one. We have our upper part, or lower part, and then the handle that we put our hand upon. Looking at the original pattern which was put out by moda fabrics, handle, the actual part that you're holding onto is an inch and a half wide by 3.5 " long. 1.5 by 2.5, I need two of those one for the top and one for the bottom. So now we have these. Now we need some background fabric to go with this handle. There again, it will be a 3.5 inch trip. Anytime you're building a block, try to stay with one large ruler and one small ruler throughout that entire block. You don't want to change out this ruler if that's the one you've been using as your guide cut. Same with this if that's the one you've been using. It's really, really important. Now we need 21.5 inch squares, one for here and one for here. There again, staying with the same rulers that you selected when you begin your blocks so important because it will change just the same as if you were to use a different so foot with your sew machine. It's very wise to stay with the same one. This is how this is going to work to go ahead and snowball this piece, our top, and our bottom. As we've been practicing before, on this lower piece, the angle needs to go from the upper right hand corner to the lower left hand corner. If you do this opposite by accident, it's not going to hurt a thing because you could just turn it upside down, fabric where you have patterns that are flowing in a certain direction such as this one, flowing in the horizontal direction and I have my top doing the very same thing. This block up here will go the opposite direction. It will be snowballed from corner to corner, starting in the upper left hand corner and going to the lower right hand corner. I always put a mark there so that I can see it when I get to the sew machine and it keeps me from getting turned around and I do not have to think about it. I know just by looking at it exactly which way I need to sew that line. Now while I'm at the sew machine, I'm going to sew a seam directly down on that drawn line for both these pieces. While I'm at the machine, I'm going to go ahead and attach this 3.5 inch sewing down the left side of it. Before I iron those open, I want to allow my quarter of an inch seam allowance and cut off that extra. On my particular ruler, I have a shading with a little X mark. I can lay those little xs right down on that seam line and that ensures that I have allowed a quarter inch seam allowance so that when I press this open, it gives me plenty of fabric. Remember, when you sew these little bitty snowballs onto piece of fabric, minimize your stitch down to 2 millimeters. So as you can see, those stitches are a little bit closer together. I've got it on 2 millimeters versus my standard 2.5 millimeter. It keeps them together a lot better because the stitches are closer and a little bit tighter. So I'm going to go to the iron and press these open. It is really starting to come together very, very quickly. Naturally, we have our top piece, or bottom piece, and we are just going to go to the machine, and we are going to sew these and attach them to our little handle here. We're going to press these open and then we'll be able to move on to the next step. Let's begin building our mug and getting it layered up and then that way, we can come back to our handle. So here is the trick to building this block. The center piece of the mug is 6.5 " long by 4.5 " tall. And these pieces, I may have to sew some together or add another fabric and then cut out the size to get it that particular size. That being said, there are leftovers that we had. These are three inch half quarter triangle squares from our present block. Those could be used, and then that way you can make up the 4.5 inch difference in that center. That is one idea. We also had these really small inch and a half, half quarter triangles leftover from the reef project, and these could be used to make the center. That is where you can really, truly get inventive. As I look at my fabrics, I'm deciding this piece says that I have leftover, they are at different measurement and I can really easily lay this on my map and see exactly how long it is. Then I can go, Oh, I need a 6.5 inch piece, or I can cut me a new piece to make it the size I need. The bottom line is the mass of the mug height with all fabrics this calling for is basically going to be 8.5 " tall and you can make it work. Then that way I can use up some of my scrap pieces and I don't have cut any more fabric, I can try and use up some of the scraps I've got. Now I have almost the height that I needed. Now, I can stop now or I can continue to add, and I think I want to add because by the time I sew all this together, I am still going to be 2 " shy on my height, and I want to make sure I've got that tied in. I also now have two same allowances. They are half inch E. Given that the original one had three colors, that's already been equivalented for. Once again, I can select another fabric or I can match this one. So here are my choices. I have the squares that I can actually sew together. I have six of them, and I'm going to make me a design and see what I get when I do that. It's just another way of tying in all of these unique, beautiful pieces that's already been created and lined out and see how we can use them. I sewed that together, and then I press this part open on your small pieces in the center like that where you're just needing a little bit of grace. They're going to naturally flap open, so it's just best to go ahead and press them open. And then, of course, these things I press to one side. Is looking pretty sharp and it's going to work great in the mix here. This is how I'm going to assemble this and see what kind of difference we have our goal on this is to get the mug at 8.5 inch. I'm going to do a scant seam line, and scant means it's not quite a quarter and it's just under a quarter. And then sometimes you just end up with what they call that it gives you that little bit of extra that you need. And sew all these strips together and press them open. Remember, press towards the dark side. So as you press, press up all the fabric, I am a 1 " exactly from having an 8.5 inch. I am going to add a piece of fabric. Now, in the original pattern, this distance, all these fabrics added together were 8.5. And use your ruler. You've got to use your ruler and you've got to keep your measurements in mind. Here's my mug really stacking up and looking great. Another thing I want to share with you is when you press your seams, the small little blocks that I had sewn together, press them one seam down, one seam up. That will take bulk out of the fabric piling and then press these upward so that will make it a lot smoother and a lot better. Off the difference here. The next move that we need to make here is building out our background fabric and attaching our handle. So to give our mug more definition, we need two inch and a half squares that we are going to snowball on these corners. We're also going to need a background strip to go a top of our handle that is going to be an inch and a half by 2.5. Because I know what lies ahead on this pattern, I'm going to go ahead and tell you that you need two more of these inch and a half squares. And we need our inch and a half by 2.5 inch. That is going to be sewn to the very top of our mug handle. So we'll do that while we're at the machine. And then on these, in the practice of these blocks, we are going to snowball in the bottom corners of our mug. Once again, but from being anglly challenged, we're going to lay our rule and we're going to draw our sew line onto the square. We'll go from the upper right hand to the lower left and on the opposite side, dark in the upper left and we will sew down to the lower right. Take, cut 2.5 inch by 2.5 inch square. We have this 2.5 inch block that's going to be sewn to the bottom. So while I'm at the sewing machine, I'm going to attach this 2.5 inch square to the bottom of the handle, and that will have four sewing tasks ready once I get over to the machine. On our snowball, we want to lay our line right on that sew line and allow that quarter Seam, and we'll have our snowball done. And I do that to both sides. Press these seams open. And then, of course, on the mug handle, we need to press these open as well. So this is looking fantastic. We are spot on with our margins and our lengths. This is an 8.5 inch mug build. And here is our handle put together with our background fabric at the top and the bottom, 8.5, and now this one. And now we can just attach and sew this down. I am most pleased with how my mug is looking thus far. And the pattern is calling for a 2.5 inch wide strip on this side that is 8.5 " long. Let's go to the machine, and let's sew this background piece over here. Cut this piece down here. They did an inch and a half square on each side. A 8.5 inch section here with a 1.5 inch square snowball. I had you to go ahead and cut two inch and a half squares, and now we need two more. We also need to select a piece of fabric that we want to be the saucer. Now I have my 8.5 inch by 1.5 inch strip, are going to snow ball the corners. To keep us from being angly challenged, we're going to draw our lines from corner to corner and sew down on that direct line. On the right side, we're going to sew from the upper right hand corner to the lower left hand corner, and then on the left side over here, we're going to sew from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner. Before we do it, let's go ahead and cut two more squares. We need those to be an inch and a half because those will be at the bottom. Let's take these to the machine. Now, again, we're going to allow that quarter inch seam. I've got my markings there. I lay it right on that seam, and I cut off the difference. So let me press that open. I'm going to sew this square onto this side of the block, and I'm going to press this side open, and I'm going to sew this square to this side. Alright? I've created my saucer, and now I'm going to attach it to the bottom of the mug. Excellent. This looks fantastic. So let's move to the next step, which is working on the top up here. There is some background fabric and the stem goes through the center, so we need to make these little tiny blocks, and then we can add the background fabric to each side of it. To create the steam going above the mug, these are 2.5 inch. And what we'll need is some background fabric with this as well. We're just going to take and sew quarter of an inch seam sew all the way around this square. We're going to do that too two of these pieces to sew all the way around these two squares. What we're going to do is we're gonna cut a diagonal from corner to corner we've sewn this square all the way around. As you can see, it's not perfectly even, and that's simply okay. And we are just going to cut a diagonal line cut from corner to corner, both directions. Do this one, and we did the other side. This should make us some really, really small squares. Want to do the same thing to this one. We only need five, but in order to make this easier for you to do and take the stress and work out of it, we are going to do the quick half quarter square triangles out of a 2.5 inch square. As you can see, they're very, very small, and that's exactly what I was trying to go for is this little bitty square, and we are not going to worry about squaring these up. We are going to simply press all of these open and we want to snip off these dog ears. We do not want those in our way. They will pose a problem and make it a little more confusing. A lot of times these are so small, you can literally press these open with your fingers. But if you have a little roll press, you can make these really flat, but they don't take a lot of effort to get them opened up and I'll do the rest the same way. And here is what we want to do. We need to pick five out. And using your ruler or your mat, try to find five that really and truly are as close in size to each other as possible. You want to try to lay them together. So there's two that I have that are almost the exact same size because some of them will be wonky like this one, and I can tell it's a little bit bigger. So I do not want that one, and that's what I mean. Out of eight that we made, we have five that match really close in size. Now, here's what's really neat. This is how you make the steam for your coffee. There we have our steam rope. Sew these together just as they are laid out here. I want to use my ruler as my little carrying tray so that I do not get these out of order or messed up. All five of those sewn together, and here is the excellent news. I did a scant quarter inch sew line on that. It looks even more like eight of a scene on each one of those. This equivalented to exactly what I was going for a 5.5 inch if I lay my ruler on there, exactly 5.5 ". I came up with using the 2.5 squares and just making quick half quarter inch square triangles, and it worked out perfectly. I'm going to take these little squares. These can be used for another project, and this is going to be centered above our mug. We need to 5.5 inch tall, by five and a quarter inch wide, sometimes it's better to just cut these a little bit bigger because you're tying in this smaller piece and it being an odd size of 1.5 ". And with the background pieces cut, I'm going to sew my little strip into the center, and then I will add the other one onto the other side. By the time you sew press those seams outward. That's the way they're going to want to fall because it's so small, going to want to just flare out to just press them out versus trying to press them one way and it gets that wave to it. It's really cool. And here we go. We are exactly on the mark. We did a great job. That direction is the way I want it. I want that steam piece to come directly out of the cup, right sides together, and sew them together. Look how beautiful that turned out. That is an absolutely gorgeous block, our prettiest one thus far, and this block is 10.5 " wide, and it is our largest one yet, 14.5 " tall. I'm going to use what I have left and show you how you can tie that in in any of your scrap pieces to make all the other pieces and make it work and still get the same measurements, the same height because by the time you follow winter quilt long series, you will have many cuts of fabric if you are using fabric by the yard such as I am. This is a way for you to use up your scrap pieces and put them into your quilt and bring all those colors and contrasts together of the other blocks. The mug was one of those. It was the perfect block to do that with and make it unique. Customize it just for you and let it really, really be a part of your quilt. Now you have a new method and you've learned a new trick on how you can get a very, very small square of an inch and a half by sewing 2.5 inch squares together and cutting on four ways to make half quarter square triangles and make them very, very small. That is another way that you have learned and advanced your skills in quilting and know that there is more than one way that you can make your quilt squares without having to do flying geese or cutting pieces and trying to sew on angle, make them all at one time. 24. Scrap Strips Advance Skills Ugly Sweater: The next quilt block we're going to do is the national ugly Christmas sweater. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be ugly, but this is a time when you want to grab all of your strips that you cut, all of your strips of fabric. If you don't, I'm going to be giving you measurements. This is the idea. All of your strips need to be no less than 1 " wide and 4 " long. You will be using them, and we're going to create some strip sets to make the sleeves and then the body. You will also need your background fabric. This is just a great time for scrap buster, and if not, it's a way to combine all the fabrics you may have selected that you want to make into your quilt. To build out my sets, I pretty much go ahead and put all of the same fabric into one pile. Far as my strips. Then that way, I can easily grab them and make my set. You will either need one continuous length of fabric that is 8 " long because you're going to be making a left sleeve and a right sleeve. In order for our left sleeve and our right sleeve to come out somewhat right, we need to match our strip sets. Their sizes. I'm going to go with 4.5 " long and I'm going to select two strips that are 1 " wide and two strips that are inch and a half wide, and the same down here for the other sleeve. If you want to do them all the same color, that is okay. I'm going to make my left sleeve and my right sleeve different colors because it's my ugly Christmas sweater and you can make it the way you want. However, just bear in mind if you do your strips 1 " or 1.5 inch, you need to have the same amount in the first set as you do in the second set. I will sew all of these together, and then I can cut it down. It doesn't matter what order they're in. You can have the 1.5 next to each other, the one inches next to each other. You build it out the way that you want to. The idea is you want four strips and they need to match in height. Now I have my set sewn together. I want these to be 3.5 " tall and that's what they are. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off the difference from my strip sets. I have both of them line here and I can easily just go straight up and do them at the same time. You can save these pieces and you could even undo the stitches if you needed them for another project. Now we have our strip sets. Just make sure that you've got it squared up and it's at least 3.5 " to 4 " by 3.5 ". Now we need to cut some background fabric. We're going to need, 2.5 inch squares. What we're going to do with these is snowball these and make it at an angle so they truly look like sleeves. Now, there's a certain way you have to sew these in order for it to come out right. Because one of these sleeves is going to be your left sleeve and the other one is going to be the right sleeve. If you are using the same fabric to make both of your strip sets, that's wonderful too. Now, this is what we've got to do. We've got to do these one at a time in order for it to come out right. What we need to do is on one of the strip sets, we're going to sew an angle from the upper right to the lower left. I'm just drawing a line. You can use your friction ink pen or any ink pen to mark that line. This one is an erasable friction ink pen. The heat from an iron will actually take off the ink. You can buy these in any of your office supply departments of any store and drug stores included. The opposite set. We are going to sew a square the opposite direction from the upper left to the lower right, and we're going to place it on the right side of the fabric. This one, you notice is on the left side, and this one is on the right side. It's important that we lay these out and do them one at a time because the fabrics will overlap. We want to take our half inch measurement on our ruler and we're going to lay it on that drawn line, and we're going to draw another line. What we're doing here is we're creating a bonus of a small as we have in previous ones. You'll get this little mini half square triangle. That's what we'll do is while we're at the sew machine, we can go ahead and achieve that. Once again, I'm going to lay my half inch measurement over because we need a quarter inch seam allowance and then on the other little half square, we also need a quarter inch seam allowance. Now we can draw directly on the fabric and when we get to the sew machine, sew directly on those lines. Now that I've got the sewn on, we're going to take our ruler again. This time we're going to use our quarter of an inch measurement and we're going to lay it directly on the actual sown line, and we're going to cut off that little square, and we will iron these back. We'll press them open. Once again, lay that quarter of an inch marking on the actual sewn line and cut off the little square. Let's go to the ironing board and press these open. So here we have our angles already on, and this is looking good. Here's our little mini squares. We can put those aside and use them for another project. Now, looking at our pieces here, as we saw them correctly, yes, we have because remember, one is going to be the left sleeve and one is going to be the right sleeve. Now you can see how it's taken form. That makes it easy to put this square on for you so that you don't get confused. This is what we're going to do. We're going to lay another 2.5 inch square of our background fabric in the left corner and one in the right corner. Now you can see how it's coming together. Once again, we're going to take our pen and we're going to draw a line from corner to corner. This really truly speeds things up and it sure makes it helpful when we're at the sew machine. I'm going to go half inch over and mark another line so that I can get my little mini square, and I'm going to do the same to this. I'm going to draw a line from corner to corner. Then I'm going to go to the sew machine and I'm going to sew directly on that drawn line. We've got our sleeves made. Now we need to make the body of our sweater. You're going to love this because it works the same way. We are going to select various pieces of our strips. We're going to build out our sweater. The idea here is these pieces for the sweater need to be at least 5 " in length. You can build it out some strips together and figure out exactly how many we need. We just need to make sure that we measure these and check to make sure that they're at least 5 " long. So if you're running into what I am where you've got all these different pieces of fabric, you want to use them all, then bear in mind that every time you attach two pieces together, you're going to discount a half an inch. If you're going for 6 " in height, just know that every time you sew a seam together, reduce it by half an inch and then you'll get taller and taller. Once I iron and pressed this open and trimmed off that black, I found that I'm actually right in a good area. It is hitten at 7.5 ", and I think that's going to serve me really well. Basically, trim this down. Square that up before I go any further so that my measurements for my background fabric are not off. They are where they're supposed to be. As you can see, I've got just a little bit of overhang there, and that just comes from doing the scant quarter inch when you sew your strips together. You can do a full quarter inch, which is what I did on this one. I'm going to bring my sleeves and look here what we have. Look how neat this looks. That just looks in direct proportion. What's grand about this is we'll have to put a neck on it. We are going to do a 3.5 inch section for the neck of our sweater. If we use our cutting mat here and we count down and you can use your roller, whichever is best for you. We need four more inches plus a half an inch seam allowance. This piece, we need to cut here a background fabric needs to be 4 " wide by 4.5 " long. We need two pieces, one for the right side, and one for the left side. So here's my background pieces. These are 4 " wide, about 4.5 " long, all I have to do now is go to the sew machine, put these right sides together and sew this one, right sides together, and sew. You know what our next step is. We're going to sew this one to the right side, and then we're going to sew this one to the left side. Let's press this back and see what we've got. Ugly Christmas sweater is quite beautiful and looking absolutely charming. This landed exactly where I truly desired it and I didn't even plan it that way. That just naturally happened. That's the wonderful thing about quilting. You'll have these gentle little surprises. And even the black, the way that black turned out at the top, I love it. Was not even planned. I just sewed those strips together and seeing what was going to happen. All right, so now we need to create our neck of our sweater. The distance that we have of all this song together before we square it up is at the 11.5 inch mark as far as width. I've selected my piece that's going to be my neck and I have my background fabrics. All we're going to do is we are going to sew one piece of background fabric to each side and the press open. So now that I have my neck piece on and my background fabrics, I am basically going to sew this to the top. Then we can square it up and trim off anything extra. I am just centering that and I have my markings on my mat up here. I know that's 5 " and therefore, I know that these seams need to be lined up with the little markings up here. If you are trying to center yours, just line up the seams. There's your 5 ", 5 ", then this piece is 3.5, so we can already see that it's 3.5. We know that that's going to be a half inch bearing if we've got it turned over backwards on each side, when we put this on two, we can line up the pieces of that cut piece on the same inside markings there. That way we know it is centered. It may not look centered, but it is centered. Now if we want to keep that from going anywhere, can pin it and transport it to the machine. If you want to check yourself, just lean it back. You can easily see it is in the center. So let's press it open and see what we've got. That is absolutely gorgeous. I am so, so pleased. I love my sweater, and I would wear this if I had one. Now, we're going to center this. Once again, we're going to use our seam lines to line up on our mat, and we are going to trim off any difference that is overhanging, including if you did like I did and used pieces from a square. Blocks will already be squared, and we will not even have to redo that. 11.5 " wide, and we have 8.5 " tall. That is our ugly Christmas sweater, which turned out quite beautiful. Now you have a guide, and you can make several of these sweaters. 25. Modify Block Full Sleeves Ugly Sweater: The next thing you'll need is all of your strips, your cutoffs from making the other blocks. Now here's the rule. No less than 4 " long, that's the shortest that you can get away with, and all of your strips need to be a minimum of 1 " wide. That will take care of it. You can do a variation or you can use all in one length you'll see as we progress and go along and we're going to create some strip sets to make the sleeves and then the body. You will also need your background fabric. This is just a great time for scrap buster, and if not, it's a way to combine all the fabrics you may have selected that you want to make into your quilt. Let's get started. In order for our left sleeve and our right sleeve to come out somewhat right, we need to match our strip sets in their sizes. I'm going to go with 4.5 " long and I'm going to select two strips that are 1 " wide and two strips that are inch and a half. And the same down here for the other sleeve. If you want to do them all the same color, that is okay. I'm going to make my left sleeve and my right sleeve different colors because it's my ugly Christmas sweater and you can make it the way you want. However, just bear in mind, if you do your strips 1 " or 1.5 inch, need to have the same amount in the first set as you do in the second set. I will sew all of these together, and then I can cut it down. It doesn't matter what order they're in. You can have the 1.5 next to each other, the one inches next to each other. You build it out the way that you want to. The idea is you want four strips and they need to match in height. Now I have my set sewn together. I want these to be 3.5 " tall and that's what they are. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off the difference from my strip sets. I have both of them line here and I can easily just go straight up and do them at the same time. You can save these pieces and you could even undo the stitches if you needed them for another project. Now we have our strip sets. Just make sure that you've got it squared up to 4 " by 3.5 ", making two sets, making each sleeve at least 3.5 " in height. The next thing we want to do is we want to bring down 22 inch squares and our 22.5 inch squares. Let's do our 2.5 inch squares first. You have to really, truly use your mind and be focused whenever you do this. The first thing I want to do though is on these squares on these 2.5 inch squares, I'm going to use my ruler and I'm going to line it up from corner to corner and I'm going to draw a line that will be my seam line. I'm using my friction erasable pen. You can use any ink pen, this won't show up. But if you were worried about leaving a mark the friction ink pens can be found in your office supply department. It has to be the erasable kind, and just the heat from your iron will erase the line. If you're using it on white, I do warn because it can leave a bit of a residue. Now, these 2.5 inch squares, because I know that I can get a bonus, I'm going to measure a half inch over from that marked line, and I'm going to draw another line. Now, I'll show you what's going to happen with that. Let's do this one the same way corner to corner, and then we'll put the extra line a half inch over and lay your half inch mark on the drawn line, and that gives a quarter of an inch seam allowance. Or both. Now, this is what I'm talking about when you have to truly focus. You're going to place one of these squares in the lower corner of your block and you're going to sew from the upper right to the lower left on both of them. You're going to do the opposite on the other square. You're going to turn your fabric and you're going to put it in the lower corner because these are going to be the sleeves and you're going to sew a line from the lower corner to the upper and the same here. On the song line. What we're going to do is take our ruler and we're going to lay that quarter of an inch mark on your ruler. We're going to lay it directly down on that song line. That will allow a quarter inch allowance over here. What you get is this bonus of a half quarter square triangle and we will end up with these little bonus squares we can have for this project or another project, and you can press those open. Let's cut this one off and then we can go to the ironing board and press them. Once again, I'm going to lay my half inch measurement over because we need a quarter inch seam allowance and then on the other little half square, we also need a quarter inch seam allowance. When we get to the sew machine, se directly on those lines. Now that I've got the sonn on, we're going to take our ruler again. This time we're going to use our quarter of an inch measurement and we're going to lay it directly on the actual song line, and we're going to cut off that little square. So here we have our angles already on, and this is looking good. Now, looking at our pieces here, as we saw them correctly. Yes, we have because remember, one is going to be the left sleeve and one is going to be the right sleeve. Now you can see how it's taking form. These are looking really, really nice. Now we want to bring down our two inch squares. Once again, let's take our ink pen and our ruler and let's draw a line from corner to corner on these squares. On these, because we have to be aware of how this is working. This is actually going to be flowing on the right side of the sweater. This one is going to be on the left side of the sweater. So we're turning them this way. Now you're starting to see your sleeve take form. You two inch squares that we draw the line on and we are once again going to snowball the corner. It's going to put that little square there and sew it from corner to corner. Will not be a lot of fabric leftover from this cutoff, putting a pin there to keep that in place until I get to the machine with it and we are going to sew directly on that line as we did the first ones. As we did before, we're going to lay our quarter of an inch marking directly on that seam line and cut off the difference because we need that quarter of an inch seam allowance. So now let's press this open and see what we have. Ta da, we have our sleeves. We have our left sleeve, and we have our right sleeves. That's just looking beautiful. And the way you want your sleeves to run is the 2.5 inch square is going to go upward. So when you look at the sleeves, lie them this way with the two inch square corner in the side and let the sleeves run vertical. So we are really truly going to put it to the challenge. We're going to create our very own unique sweater to where our sleeves are coming back in. So here we are, this looks fantastic now, doesn't it? All we have to do now is attach these to each side, and then we can reattach it to the body. But before I do that, let me just go over this to be sure that you acknowledge our two inch square, this is a two inch square. The 2.5 inch is on the outside. Once again, same over here, two inch square and our 2.5 inch is on the outside of our background fabric. That's what we are going by and that's what we're matching up. Now, before I attach the body back, it is important to press this out and make sure that those things are pressed out the same as you would any other time. I'm going to press those. Then when I get done, I'm going to simply lay that over and sew it down. As you can see, it is exactly the right length with no problem at all. Do not think I could be any more pleased. It is absolutely beautiful, as I have pictured it in my mind. The very same size as the one before, 11 by 8.5 ". Pretty nice sweater. You could do a whole quilt, maybe some with only the half sleeve and others with a full sleeve. You got two ways 26. Strip Spool Star Surprise: Great for your scrap busters and turning them in to something really beautiful. To make the very first strip set, you're going to need a 2.5 inch wide strip and 21.5 inch background strips. Remember, these need to be at least 9 " long, on this first set, we're going to take it to the sewing machine. We are going to attach a background piece to the top and a background strip to the bottom. Let's press this open. When you do these seams, you want to press these backwards, keeping them pressed outward. This looks fantastic. If we did this right, this should be 4.5 ". Yes, it is. We have 4.5 ". Let's set this one aside, we'll come back to it. Our next strip set, we want to sew 21.5 inch wide strips to a center background strip that is 2.5 " wide, wide by 9 " long and we are going to attach this one to the upper side of our strip and sew it down when I attach it to the bottom side and sew it down. When we do this one, we want to press our seams towards the white. I know that's unusual, but on this one, we're going to press those seams in towards the white versus outward. Now if we did this right, this should be 4.5 " as well, and there we have it. We have a 4.5 inch tall. The next step we're going to do is really easy. We're going to take these two and we're going to put them together and we're actually going to sew them together. We're going to sew the upper half and the lower half, 9 " long. The reason why we pressed it the way we did is so that our seams will nest up together. When you lay your pieces together, you can see that this seam and this seam are going to nest up really good to each other and you should be able to get a really even sew. There again, those two are nested up real nice together. It just snugs it up and you don't get any shifting. Now that we've got our set sewn together or 4.5 " tall, and what we're going to do is we're going to measure over 4.5 so that we can cut them into squares. We're going to cut the first one out, and that should leave us another 4.5 " exactly 4.5. That's perfect. Now that we have these sewn together, we're going to take them back to the machine, and we're going to sew on each side of this square. We're going to sew put a seam on both sides on each one. Now we have two blocks made. This is where the magic happens. We're going to cut these from corner to corner. We're just going to lay our ruler on here from one corner to the other and we're going to cut a diagonal. We're going to turn around and we're going to do a cut on the diagonal on the opposite direction. Now we have those four. We're going to do the same thing to this block, corner to corner, make sure you got your ruler good and lined up and cut that one. And then keep them together. This is where a good rotating mat can come in handy. But if we just practice a little bit of control, we can do it on the mat and we're going to cut that right there on the diagonal. Now let's take these to the iron board and press them open and see how beautiful they are. Now we have our blocks ironed open, and here is where part of the magic happens. You can see it with these, but we need to make another set just so you can see it more. But I will show you if we take our blocks and we turn, say the small point inward, these is the pieces that have the small point. And then we have the ones with the larger point and we turn them on the outside. Yes, you see the hourglass, but you also see the spool that's happening right here. If we turn these, you can see it even more. We're going to turn this just like that. Now we have this hourglass but spool effect going on, and you can see that little spool show up here and you can see the spool there. Now, if you do them the opposite, you get a strong effect with seeing the handle seer or the top of the spool and you can put them together this way. There's so many ways you can turn them and you're going to get a different effect every time. Now we have this hourglass or spool that's going on there because you can see the tops. Then if we make a secondary set, you will see how laying these out that certain way, it makes a star with all the points and these multiple spools going on. We're going to make a secondary set. Once again, we're going to make two more strip sets. We need one of our main fabrics and two of our 1.5 inch strips. Main fabric being a 2.5 inch strip, and we're going to attach one to the top and one to the bottom, on the other we're going to duplicate the very same thing. We're going to take a 1.5 inch strip these need to be at least 9 " long. Of our main fabric, and we're going to use 12.5 inch strip of our background fabric. We're going to take these to the machine, attach them one to the top, and the other down at the bottom. Ahead and press these open. Now remember, on this one, you want to press the seams outward and on this one, you want to press the seams inward. Then that way they nest up really nice because once again, we're going to put these together and we see that those seams will just nest up perfectly and that will keep it from getting all wonky on you. And we'll sew these together on both sides. We've got those sewn together. I did not check before, but I'm pretty sure that we have these at 4.5 ". Yes, we do. That means we're going to cut this nine inch section in half. We need to cut these at 4.5 " over. That will be the center cut these in half. We need to take them back to the sewing machine. We're going to sew on each side. So now we got both sides sewn and I've got my fiscers rotating mat. This is the small one. This comes in real handy for the next task that we're going to do. We're going to lay our roller from corner to corner as we did before to cut from corner to corner. We're going to rotate this and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to lay our roller down, and we're going to cut from corner to corner, and that's going to create four half square triangles, and we'll do the same thing to the next block, and we'll take them to the ironing board and press them open. Once you decide how you want yours laid out, it's real important to square it up. It may just be the slightest amount, but with your cotton fabrics and pressing them and these being pressed so many times in different ways, you may have some pulls or it looks wonky and stretchy looking, and that's really normal and you'll just have these really small fractions of pieces that might hang off the sides, really, really small. That way, if you square it up 9.5 by 9.5 inch square, and there we go. Really nice block, and it's just beautiful. We have all of our spools. 27. Outro Winter Quilt: Congratulations. We've arrived at the end of the course that you have completed on the Winter Project quilt making. Along the way, I know that you have gained confidence. You have a firm understanding of the terminology. You know all about the tools, and you have the ability now to proceed with any theme, fabric, or method you would like in order to make a quilt that is Christmas theme and lots of variety of different blocks you can make. Now, as a beginner, your adventure has just begun in this time lasting treasure and heirloom. Trade and skill. As an intermediate, you're just seeking data and gathering more data and ideas for future projects as well as practicing projects. As a professional, you so love it, you're just seeking for more to do. I've enjoyed having you as a student. I've enjoyed the projects you've submitted and the community chat is always there for you to ask questions and learn tips and tidbits that you may have discovered along your journey. I offer more courses right here on skill share. You can check them out right here on the profile and perhaps there's another project that you would enjoy having me to show you and I would love to have you as a student. Don't forget to give feedback. That lit Skillshare know that I am conveying the information well and the course is digestible, understandable, and fun to be. That encourages other people who may be reading some of the reviews and deciding on what course they would like to take. I'm Elizabeth, the instructor here and I've enjoyed having you as a student. Congratulations. Until the next skill share course, well, I'll be quilting.