Fat Quarters Session 3: Working with Fat Eighths
National Quilters Circle EditorsDescription
While fat quarters is something that you can usually find individually or in bundles, fat eighths are something that generally only come in bundles. Very rarely you will find maybe a basket or a collection of them at a small specialty fabric store that allows you to buy fat eighths individually. But normally they are in bundles such as this. As with a fat quarter, bundles can contain anywhere from eight, 12, sometimes even 15 or 16 in a bundle. It kind of depends on the collection, the fabric manufacturer, or maybe even where you're purchasing them from.
When you grab a fat eighths, now if you're not overly familiar with them you may grab it and think oh, this is a fat quarter. I have plenty of fabric. But you'll recognize pretty much as soon as you unfold it that it is not as much fabric. It is half of the fabric. Again, as I mentioned in the beginning how fat eighths are made, you have your eighth yard of fabric which is 4.5, cut on the fold, and then stacked on top of each other.
And that gives you a little bit extra fabric, so it should be roughly nine inches. Now when you are cutting your fat eighth or using your fat eighth, the amount of usable space that you're going to have is going to depend on your fabric, on the print, on the quality of fabric and the manufacturer. And so you may not get exactly nine by 21. Similar to with your fat quarter, you might have a little bit less actual usable fabric. Again, a lot of that will depend on your fabric design.
So if you have a design like this, it's more of an allover design. You can sort of get away with the fact that it may not be straight right across the bottom edge or one of your edges, and you can get more fabric out of it. That's also especially the case if you have fun prints like these where there is really no direction to them at all. But if you have a print like this one here, this is one that came in a bundle. I got it at my local craft store.
You can see that this is the line right along the edge where it was was cut which is what's giving me my roughly nine inches from here to here. But you can see with the pattern that it is nowhere near straight. So by the time I actually take and if I go off of this edge of the pattern, and I bring this edge up so I'm cutting off the half of this top design and I make this straight, I'm down to only about eight inches of usable fabric. So just because it's labeled as nine by 21 depending on the print, again depending on the quality of fabric, you may not always get that exact nine by 21. So while half square triangles worked perfect for fat quarters, a fun one to do with fat eighths is to not actually even use a pattern.
You're just simply going to cut it apart. But you need to be consistent in the sizes that you're going to cut apart. So the first thing that you wanna do is you want to square up your fabric. So I'm gonna move this aside just a little bit. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off the salvage edge of my fabric.
I'm going to do that by bringing in my ruler, and I want to line it up on one of my inch marks just to make it easy. But I also want to make sure that I'm aligning it right along that design. Since I have a very prominent line design on my fabric, I can very easily use that to help line up my edge so I know I'm getting a nice straight cut. So I'm essentially just cutting right on the outside of my green little designs there and giving myself a straight line to start with. I can then use this straight line to then square up my long edges of my fabric.
So you can see that I really am nowhere near being square once I line that up. It's very far off. So what I wanna do here is the exact same thing, find another one of my lines to align it with on my grid here. Line it up and I can go ahead and use my ruler and give myself a straight line. Go all the way across here.
Go ahead and move my ruler down and continue cutting. So now I have a straight line along the bottom and one side. Now I want to decide what length I want. So if we are going to be doing a fun pattern where you don't actually have to have exact measurements, you just wanna get a certain number of pieces from your fat eighth which is what this one is going to be, we want essentially long pieces from our fat eighth and we want short pieces. So to do this, you want to make a number that is easily divisible by two in terms of height.
So for me, I picked eight inches just because given some of my designs, it was off a little bit. So I went eight inches this way. And then I'm going to try and get 20 inches long ways. Given that they're generally 21 inches and they're supposed to be nine by 21, a lot of times you can get eight by 20 out of them. So if I do that here, I can go all the way over to my two inch line.
And that is going to give me my 20 inches, so I can go ahead and cut this side off here. Again, making sure I'm all lined up like so. And then I can go ahead and square up my top edge as well. So depending on the amount of fabric you have in your collection, maybe some of the prints. This print and this print came from the exact same collection.
I was obviously able to get a little bit more fabric from this non-directional print up here than I was the one I'm working with right now. So if you're going to use a method like this, you want to find your most directional pattern or the one that has the most off center line. And you're going to find the most usable space out of that one and use that as your reference for the rest of the pieces that you're cutting apart. Go ahead and move my ruler down. Continue that cut there.
Missed a thread, and now I have the rectangle of usable space that I will be getting from each one of my fat eighths. So from this, I now want to take and cut it in half vertically and then in half... I'm sorry, in half vertically and in half horizontally as well. We're cutting it in half twice. You can measure that really quick.
Or I have a hard time counting sometimes while I'm trying to talk, so I like to just put a fold mark there in the center that gives me a straight line to go off of. And I can go ahead and cut right along my fold line. From now, from this one, I can go ahead and stack them on top of each other so I can cut two at the same time. And I want to cut these in half horizontally as well. Again, I'm just gonna do my fold line to give me a quick reference to see where I need to be.
Line my fold line up and go ahead and cut this in half. And now you wanna do this with all of your pieces. So you should be getting four long pieces from each one of your fat eights. You're gonna set two of those aside. Those are going to go into your long piece pile.
And now you're going to take your other two, and you're going to cut them in half to make smaller pieces. So these should be 10 inches, so we're cutting them in half to be five inches like so. And you're gonna set these aside into your smaller piece pile. So now from your collection of fat eighths or your bundle of fat eighths no matter how many there was, from each one of those you're gonna get two long pieces and you should get four short pieces per each piece that came in your bundle. Now you can lay these out in essentially any sort of layout that you want.
What you need to know is that when you sew your short pieces back together, they will no longer fit exactly underneath one of our long pieces because we have a seam allowance. Because of this, you need to make sure you just have the same number of short and long pieces in the same row. So as long as one row contains at least one long and two short pieces, you can lay them out in a variety of different ways like this and get a really fun arrangement really quick and easy with no real pattern needed and continue on. It doesn't matter if your short pieces are next to each other, if they're on opposite ends of your rows as long as you have the same number of pieces in each row. And then you can just piece them together.
And in just one collection of fat eighths, you can very easily put together something that is maybe a table runner. You could put together a small collection of place mats, and it comes together really quick and easy without any kind of pattern necessary. So I'm gonna show you one that I made from the same bundle of fabrics that's right here. And this is all just the same bundle of fabrics, and I cut it apart the exact same way. So I found my most amount of usable space.
In general, you can assume that's at least eight by 20. Cut those in half vertically and horizontally, and then cut one of those little stacks down into smaller pieces. And you have a very quick and easy table runner, no patter needed. Now if you want to do a design with fat eights that has a little bit more of a pattern required, that's still something you can do using pretty much the exact same basic shape in terms of shorter and longer rectangles. And that is to make a plus sign quilt or a plus sign pattern.
So here is an example of a plus sign pattern here. I'm just gonna bring in part of it to show you. And you can see here we have all of our fat eights that we've cut apart into long rectangles and short rectangles. And then the way they're stacked together in our matching colors makes a fun plus sign. This entire top which is really quite large was made from one bundle of fat eights that had 12 fabrics in each.
So off of the amount of usable space that you can get off of your fat eighths bundle, you can make this quilt top size, this addition quilt. And one of the PDFs that you're going to be able to download with this class is the pattern for that. So it kind of looks like maybe a brick building if you're just looking at it, but this is all of your long and short rectangles. So there's three different versions of this pattern that you'll be seeing. One is a blank version that allows you to be able to color in whatever colors you wanna use and sort of play with your own design.
Another version has all of your measurements. So it has exactly how big you need to cut your pieces whether they're your long rectangles, your smaller squares, or your sort of intermediate rectangles on the edges to sort of complete that design. Another way you're going to see that pattern is with numbers and colors. So I've numbered my fabrics one through 12 because my fat eighth bundle came with 12 fabrics. And this is where I placed my one through 12.
You'll notice that one doesn't have any colors at all, and that's where I sort of pieced together a scrappy unit. And then this is what it looks like with all of the colors. So you will be able to see all of these different versions. You can download all of these patterns and get the exact measurements you'll need to make this a plus sign quilt from a simple fat eighths bundle of fabric. Obviously you're limited if your bundle only has eight or 10 fabrics in it, whereas mine used 12.
And obviously you can add more if your bundle has more as well. But this is just a really fun place to start when it comes to working with fat eighth fabrics. Either using a pattern like this or just finding your usable space and cutting them apart, you can easily create a fun quilt top, table runner, place mat, or any other quilted project you want using those fat eighth bundles.
Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.
Already a member? Sign in
No Responses to “Fat Quarters Session 3: Working with Fat Eighths”