Breaking The Quilting Rules

I love quilting and I love making quilts. And sometimes I get caught up in the precision and accuracy of piecing and sometimes it's a nice idea to just let go of those rules and remember to just have fun. I've started to make a few quilts with those ideas lately and that's what I'm gonna show you today. This was a real fun quilt that I made, kind of like log cabin-ish. The center pieces are not all exactly the same size and that was kind of a fun rule to break.

Usually you would add strips around it that are exactly the same size with exactly the same fabrics. And I kinda let that rule go too. It was fun to not worry about if I had enough fabric for each of the rounds to do the five blocks that match and the four blocks that match. So when I ran out of fabric on this, I put in some pieces that kinda matched and a few that were little higher contrast and same thing with a block over here. When I ran out of fabrics, I would add something else.

When I put in a pink and a white to go around there. When I ran out of the green, I added a green that was really similar and I was kinda disappointed it didn't stand out more. So I started putting some pieces that were a little bit more high contrast. And when it comes to the border, you don't even have to worry about how much fabric you have for the border. You can see that the purple above and below the center row of blocks are not the same.

When I ran out of the one fabric, I ran to my stash and got something that was similar. And when I had not enough for the edges, I took a whole bunch of little pieces of scraps. I bet you have a bunch in your stash right now, and just sewed 'em together and pieced in the border there too. So you can probably see that that's a fun way to be kind of traditional with your quilt making but break a few rules along the way. And I wanna show you a few more projects I've worked on that have the same kind of an idea.

Here's some blocks that I made recently that were really fun. I took a bunch of little scraps and I keep some pretty tiny little scraps and I sewed 'em together willy nilly to just make a bigger piece. This is a fun thing that you can do when you really need a mindless project, which this was. I pulled out scraps that really were about the same group of colors and just started to sew stuff together until it fit another piece. And then sewed something else together and sewed that on until I had something that was about this size, the size that I wanted for the center, which I trimmed to six and a half by 12 and a half inches for this very center.

Part of the trick for doing this kind of weird piecing is to trim things to the same size which is how I got the blocks on that quilt to fit together. I made the outer strips large and trimmed all of those blocks to the same size. You can see that in these blocks, no two of 'em are exactly alike. They have some repeat fabrics and there are some fabrics that are just kind of the lone fabric from my stash that seemed to work with this color way. There's no other piece of this in the quilt anywhere, in the blocks anywhere, I don't think.

So just sewing together until they fit something else and if something's too long, trim it off. If something's too short, add to it. Those are the only rules that I used for doing these blocks. And then when I was finished with them, I put this dark green border on it to frame 'em. And then, you know, some aqua and I'm not sure just what I'll do with these.

That'll be fun to design the rest of the quilt. Here's the simple way to kinda break a rule with a block that's already been traditionally pieced. I just added strips around a regularly pieced star block and then trimmed it at a tilt. So whatever quilt this ends up going in, it'll just have a little bit of whimsy. The next quilt I'd like to show you is a really cool quilt that was made by a friend of mine from Tucson, Nancy Arsenault.

She took a class from Gwen Marston and Freddy Moran which was about liberated quilting or liberated piecing. And it's about breaking the rules or not bothering to follow the rules. And it's a really fun way to work. You can see on this quilt, she didn't bother to figure out how to make the piecing round the corner exactly. And that's just something that we worry about when we're being fussy quilt makers.

It's fun to just let that go. And the printed checkerboard border, this is printed, not pieced. She just chopped it off and sewed it where it would would go without worrying about matching the pattern along there. It adds a real fun, whimsical look to things. Part of why these quilts that I've shown you work so well is that they have limited color schemes.

It's not hard to run to your stash and grab another piece of fabric that might match these. You can get into a little bit, certainly more difficulty, when you're using multiple colors and you can still end up with great quilts but this is a great way to start with these really simple color schemes. There's some books that can help you get going. If you really enjoy this kind of piecing. "Liberated Quiltmaking," there's two of these books, written by Gwen Marston.

One of the women that taught the class from that quilt I last showed you. These have a lot of different techniques for just giving up the fussiness of piecing. Jan Mullen's books and and breaking the rules quilts obviously fits with this and "Quilters Playtime" has multitude of ideas different from the others for just doing some fun piecing and letting it go. I'm gonna get out of my sewing machine now and show you a few techniques for this liberated, unfussy breaking the rules piecing. I wanna show you some blocks that I'm working on for a relaxing the rules kind of a quilt.

Here's some fabrics that I thought would be fun to work with. I had several pieces of this fabric and I brought in a lot of little bits of other stuff that I had that I thought went with it. I'm going to do a star to start with. There's the center of my star. And these are the little background pieces that I'm going to put the star points on, to piece the star points on.

Now to do a traditional type star point, you would take the square and draw the line on it. And sew on the square and do the stitch and flip and then do it on this side too. And that would be your traditional star, with exactly the same points matching perfectly right here. And that's just not what I wanna do for this quilt. So I'm gonna do something a little bit different.

I've taken some fabrics and cut triangles out of them and I'm going to put the triangle here and stitch along the edge and then flip. So I'll get going with that little piece. I'm aligning the triangle and I can fold it to see if it's gonna cover and that's not going to. So I need to change my angle a little bit and picture a quarter of an inch seam allowance along the raw edge of this triangle and flipping it. So that probably will work.

And if it doesn't, I can show you how you could fix it easily. There's my quarter of an inch that I sewed along that raw edge, and I'm going to flip it over and I'm just gonna finger press it here. What you wanna do is now flip it over this direction and trim the raw edges of the little sewn triangle. Even with the background square. You'd probably rotary cut this after you pressed it but I'm just gonna quickly trim it with scissors.

So I can go on to the next point. And now I'm gonna put this star point on. They might meet in the middle, or they might not. And that's part of the fun of it is you don't necessarily know what you're going to get. So once again, I align this somewhere.

I'm gonna test it and see if it'll flip. And if I sew it and flip it and I find it doesn't cover, you can just sew on another piece of fabric at an angle like that and get it covered. That's really part of the fun of this is not knowing what you're gonna get. There's not a rule, so you didn't break any rule. You're just kinda making it up as you go And the sewing is just that simple.

And once again, I'm going to just finger press it for today. And that's gonna be some pretty little bitty star points but I bet it'll look fun on this star center for our little block, and I'm just quickly trimming that away. I actually would trim away the base fabric underneath that to have a little bit less fabric, but I'm not gonna take the time to do that right now. Let's bring the star back in here. Well, it's not a star.

Now it's becoming a star with its star points on there. And I made two more units just to show you what that will look like. There's two more little star point areas. Obviously, I'd have to make one for up here too but that's just kind of have a fun and funky little star. When you sew it together, you know it's all gonna work because the base squares were all the same size.

So all of your odd little piecing is sewn on a base square. So putting it together is not gonna be difficult at all. Another fun block to work on in this kind of a style is log cabin. A log cabin usually has the same width strips sewn all the way around the sides in rounds, changing the value, if you want to, with darks on one side, light on the other, and I'm going to do this sewing different width strips then not following the order that you're supposed to. I've gone to the side and then this side and then this side, instead of going around as a curve I'm not really done with this block.

I'm gonna sew some more strips on it at some point, but I might then start sewing some over here, whatever I wanna do, 'til it's the size that I want the whole block to be. And you don't even have to use straight strips. Everything else that I've sewn so far is pretty much straight lines, but this one, I just sewed on a strip and cut it at an angle. And now as I add more strips, this thing will come to a funny angle, a funny size. And then when I figure it's about the right size I'll trim it to be a square so that it will be easy to sew to other parts of the quilt.

And the last thing I wanna show you is not sewing a straight seam at all. I've got what looks like a little start of a log cabin block and the strip I'm gonna sew on the side and I'm going to cut a gently curved line right through here. The keyword is gentle. The more gentle you're cutting or your line is, the easier it's going to be to piece it. And if my fabric's creeping along in front of the rotary cutter that's just fine because this is no rules.

We're not gonna worry about things being straight or being exactly the same. So hopefully I've cut through both layers there. Not quite Kind of an awkward angle to cut at. I threw away the two little skinny bits. This was the skinny piece from the dark one.

This is the skinny piece from the top one. And now I'm going to put those right sides together and pin at the curves and sew it. It's kind of a funny looking scene that you do. And if you haven't sewn weird wonky curves like this, it might look really strange and that's kinda why I wanted to show you today. I'm going to put these right sides together.

And I want to pin the valley of of one curve to the peak of the other fabric curve. So there's one pin and then I'm going to do the same thing with the other one. I'm going to pin the valley of this curve to the peak of this one. And you do end up with a weird, funky thing that looks like it's not ever gonna sew together but we're gonna ease it in. And with super pressing, it'll be flat.

So I'm going to pull the edges together at the beginning of this seam. This is the place you want to use needle down for sure because you're gonna do some readjusting as you sew this. If your seam is not exactly a quarter of an inch, it doesn't matter on this. So I'm sewing along following the edge of this top piece. And sometimes I have to pivot to be able to keep the presser foot along that edge.

Remove my pin as I get to it, readjust underneath and make sure I don't have a pleat in there. And sew along the edge. I'm gonna stop fairly often to readjust, and kinda keep the edges together. It's really, it seems awkward and it feels funny if you're used to really precise piecing because you're not really worrying about an exact seam allowance. Should be pretty much a quarter of an inch, but I know people get real worried about this lump of fabric happening in here.

And I'm just about to the end of this. We'll take it out and see what we've got. Here's how it looks sewn. And when I just finger press it, I think you can see that it's going to lie flat. If I had an iron, I would show you that it's really flat and it's kind of fun to have a little curve like that in there.

You can do that with any block that you want to, especially seams that were intended to be straight, if you make 'em a little bit curvy, you can do your sashing this way. You can do an outer border this way. You just overlap the two pieces a little bit and just cut a gentle curve. So these are just a few fun things that I've been working on lately, just to get out of the heavy duty rules that I sometimes fall into. I hope you'll give these a try.

It's really a lot of fun and it might put a lot more whimsy into your quilts.