Creating Templates for Foundation Piecing

I'm going to show you a technique for making templates that you can use when you do foundation piecing when you cut out your patches for your foundation pieced quilts. Now, when I was taught to foundation piece, I was taught that all you had to do was simply cut a piece of fabric large enough to cover the patch. But I began to discover over time that that caused a few problems and that it would be better to be more precise. And so I'm going to show you today how to be more precise. A key reason for doing this is to use less fabric and at the price of quilting fabric today we're all anxious to make the best use of our precious quilting fabrics.

The second reason to use it is because it allows you to be more precise when you begin to put your pieces together on the quilt. If you foundation piece very much, you've had the experience of putting your patch on, flipping it over, pressing it out and discovering that it doesn't quite cover. When you cut with templates you'll find that this doesn't happen to you. That you'll be able to put your pieces on very precisely and you won't have to do all that unstitching that you've done in the past. It's also a process that will allow you to cut your patches so that the outside edge is around the grain line.

Now you probably were taught like I was that grain line didn't matter in foundation piecing because you were stitching your patches to paper and the paper would keep the patches that were on bias from stretching. However, you may have discovered that once you got ready to put your blocks together and you wanted to take the paper off to do that, the outside edges began to stretch. And when we have outside edges of blocks that stretch, we have quilts that don't lay flat on the bed or the wall or wherever we want to put them. Instead, we kind of have quilts that ripple. So we're going to be able to cut on grain line when we cut our templates and I'll be showing you how to do that.

And finally, if you're like me, you like to do fussy cutting. It's really fun to find a motif within your fabric that you really want to highlight in certain places in your quilt. But with foundation piecing, that can be really difficult. It becomes easy to do when you use the templates for your cutting. Today we're going to be working with a block that comes from this lovely quilt Mediterranean Voyage.

This quilt was designed by Angie Hodap, the editor in chief of Quilters newsletter, and it was made by Peg Spradlin, a very talented quilter who often works with the magazine. And so I'm going to show you how to cut one of the patches for this quilt today. We're going to begin by working with the foundation for the block. This quilt includes several blocks. This is one of the several blocks in the quilt.

We're going to start by marking our block in terms of certain information we're going to need. And I recommend that for your marketing, you always use a fine tip permanent marker. If you use a marker that's not permanent, you're going to run the risk when you get into pressing of having your marker bleed either onto the sole of your iron which is a nasty mess to clean up or onto your fabric which often can't be cleaned up. So we're going to use a permanent marker. Now there's several things that you're going to want to mark on your block.

Because we're working with a block that was printed in Quilters newsletter, several of these already appear but I'm going to point those out to you and then show you what you need to add. You're going to want to identify what block this piece is for. And you will see printed on here that this is for block V. You're also going to want to mark which unit. As you know, when we create foundation blocks, sometimes the block is one unit but sometimes it takes several unit and this particular block requires two units.

And so this patch that we're going to deal with is in unit one and you'll see that it's marked unit one. We also want to mark how many we're going to make. This will save you a lot of time looking back. So you're going to want to mark how many you're going to need. And for this block, you're going to need 12.

And again, this is already written on here but you will want to be sure that you put this on if it's not on your pattern. You're also going to want to write the piecing order onto it. And most of your patterns will come with piecing numbers on but just in case, this is the fourth patch that you're going to put onto this unit of the block. Two other things I like to include are what color fabric. Now, this particular foundation is printed in color but generally speaking, that's not the case.

So I'm going to write the color onto it. I'm going to write light blue because that's the color we're going to be using here. And the final thing I want to mark onto my block, onto my foundation, is I'm going to want to mark the grain line. Remember I told you that using this method you'll be able to cut your patches on the straight of grain but you're going to need a grain line to do that. I recommend that to do that, you use a clear plastic ruler, a flat ruler, not your acrylic template that you use for cutting.

That's a little too thick, but a flat ruler. And it does need to have a quarter line marking on it that you can see through. You're going to want to align this with the edge of your patch and simply make a straight line. That will be your grain line. And then the standard symbol is to put arrows at either end.

So you know that what that line is, is the line that shows you your straight of grain. Now that we have finished marking our foundation block we're ready now to move to the light box for the next step of our process. We're now ready to work on our light box to actually begin to draw our template. The first step that we're going to do is we're going to tape down the foundation on the light table because we don't want it to move as we begin to trace. I like to use the removable tape when I tape it down, just comes up a lot easier.

And if you're gonna be reusing your foundation you won't damage your foundation as you remove the tape. Once you have the foundation on your light box now you're going to overlay it with a piece of freezer paper. And again, good idea to put the freezer paper down with a little bit of tape so that it will not shift as you begin to trace. Again, using our permanent marker and our nice flat ruler. We're going to actually trace the patch that we're going to be making the template for.

So it's just as simple as tracing the lines of the template. You'll notice as I'm tracing this, that the shape of our template has a number of strong angles to it. It's a parallelogram. And many of the shapes in this particular quilt are either parallelograms or they're triangles. That's a time when this particular technique is especially helpful because you've got to stitch things on at those unusual angles.

Now, once we have traced our patch, now we're going to line up our ruler a half inch away from the outside edge. And we're going to draw a line a half inch away from the edge all the way around. And it doesn't matter if you run outside lines a little bit in the end we're going to be cutting this, cutting this out. And so if your lines aren't quite even at the corners it's not gonna be a problem. Now you will notice that at your outside corners, you have extensive points.

The best thing to do with these is to just lop off some of that. If you have all that point sticking out, it'll make your piecing more difficult. So you're just gonna take those off. And when you cut you won't be cutting clear to the corners of those. Now one last thing you want to do while you have this on the light table is you want to trace your grain line onto your freezer paper.

And again, do make the arrows at the end. So when you get ready to cut out, you'll know why you have that line there. This is the last step we're gonna do on the light table. We're now ready to move to the last few steps before we actually cut our patches. Now that we have traced our patch we're ready to add the information to it.

If you remember all the things that we made sure were on the foundation so we'd have that information, we're going to simply transfer that to our patch. So what we want to do is to add the block designation, which in this case, we're talking about block V. We're going to add the unit designation. And if you'll recall, this was unit one. And we want to add the information on how many to make when you start cutting.

You'll be very glad to have that information and we're going to make 12, and we're going to transfer the piecing order, and that's the number four, and we're going to transfer the fabric. And again, when you're cutting you'll be so glad to not have to keep looking back to figure out which fabric to cut this on. Once we have all this information transferred onto our template, now we're ready to cut the template out. And right now you can just do a rough cut. You don't want to have a lot of extra paper, But you can have, you don't have to cut right on your lines right now.

Now that we have our template cutout we're ready to put this onto the fabric so we can cut out our actual pieces. And if you've worked with freezer paper before you know that the shiny side will stick to your fabric. So it's just as simple as ironing it down, no pins to worry about that you have to cut around or that you have to take time to put in or to remove. And now that we have our template on our fabric, we're ready to cut it out. And this time you want to cut very precisely on the lines because this is going to be your finished patch.

We're going to just cut on those outside lines. Be sure you cut on the outside lines because that's your seam allowance fabric. That's what you need to have it for. And you want to be sure that whenever you're cutting you're cutting away from yourself. You do not want to pull your blade towards your body.

You want to always push it away as you cut out. And if you'll recall we were going to take those little corners off. So be sure you come in and you remove the corners. You now have your piece cut out and all you have to do is simply remove your template. And you have your patch for your quilt.

And you'll just do that as many times. Now you can stack layer if you'd like to, many of us like to speed up the cutting process by cutting more than one at a time. I like to cut up to four at a time but you might want to do even six or eight as some people do. And one way to help with that so it won't slip is just do a little spray starch between your layers, press them together, and they'll stay together nicely as you cut even though they're not actually right next to the template as is your first top piece. Once you have this cut, you're ready to put it into your quilt.

I hope the next time you're doing foundation piecing, you'll give making templates for your cutting a try. I believe you'll find that it really saves your fabric and it speeds up your piecing and it gives you an opportunity to be sure that your outside edges are on the straight of grain.