Freestyle Piecing to Make Original Quilt Blocks

We're gonna start with freestyle curve piecing and it's a very, very useful tool. And that's what all of these things that I'm doing today really are. Is they're new tools for you to put in your toolbox to use to design your own quilts with or to make changes to the quilts that you already have designs for. The freestyle curve, a lot of people are afraid of doing curve piecing and there are all kinds of new tools out there on the market to help you with it. I'm kind of a minimalist when it comes to all those tools.

I feel like I have everything I need with my rotary cutter, my sewing machine and a few pins. So we're just going to do it kind of freestyle with no extra help from any other tools. And we're gonna give this wonderful, nice tight curves and they're gonna be so easy and you're gonna start using these all the time. What I need to know about the curves that I'm sewing, is how they're gonna be used. And this is gonna be used as a boarder.

So I'm gonna start with two pieces of fabric that are the length of the border, plus a little bit and the width of the finished border. So my finished border is going to be three inches wide. So I've got two pieces of fabric that are cut three inches wide and they're the same exact length. Being the same exact length is important because that helps you match everything up when you're doing your pinning. Now I want my curves to be relatively deep but not really, really tight and deep.

And so I'm going to overlap my two fabrics, right side up, both of them. Now these are both hand dyes, so they don't really have a right or back side. But sometimes you'll be using something other than a hand dye and you'll be happy to remember that both fabrics need to be right side up. So they're overlapped and they're lined up at each end. Once that's done, I'm just gonna take my rotary cutter and I'm gonna gently start doing a curve.

And you're gonna see that as I cut the curve, the fabric is gonna start to creep forward. And to keep it laying flat, I have to kind of pull at this far away end so that it doesn't double back up on itself. So we're just gonna start with, and I have to keep my cut so that it's no deeper than this 1.1/2 inches or so that I've overlapped the fabric. So that's the important thing. Now I can feel where that other fabric is underneath this fabric.

So that gives me an idea of how deep I can cut this. So I'm just gonna do some gentle curves. And as the fabric starts to crease, you can see that I'm just kind of controlling it with my left hand. And there we go. So it's that easy.

I'm going to remove this top portion of the blue and come in here and remove the bottom portion of the green. And now you can see how perfectly those two fit together. Now I like to put little hatch marks in along the curves so that when I turn over and start piecing them together, I know that I'm matching them up exactly. I don't mark with a marking tool or a pencil or anything like that because I'll be marking on this side and I won't be able to see it when I turn it over. But if I mark a crease in it, I can see it when I turn it over.

So I'm gonna be using my seam ripper to just mark a little crease, here and there that I can then use to line up the fabrics when I turn them over on top of each other. Because I'll be able to see that crease from both sides of the fabric. Now some people like to just put a few pins in, I'm a pinner when it comes to this sort of thing. Not with other things but definitely with this. So I'm going to put a pin everywhere that there is a hatch mark first.

And then I'll go in between and probably put some more pins in. And I think the pinning probably takes the longest in the whole process but it's well worth it when you end up with a really, nice curved piece. Oops, I have lost sight of my marks. So I'm gonna come back over here to this end and make sure that I've got them in the right place. And you can tell if everything's in the right place by whether or not it kind of moves into the curve when you give it a bit of a stretch.

Okay, so now I'm going to pin in between and then we'll start sewing. And when I pin in between, you can see that I'm rolling the fabrics one way or the other so that we can line up the raw edges. So now we're ready to sew. And you wanna just use a regular seam allowance that you would normally use. A 1/4 inch if that's what you like to do.

Remember this is your pattern, so you can pretty much do whatever you want to do. Now as I get going, I always put my needle in the needle-down position so it'll hold its place when I have to do any adjusting along the way. And I really pay close attention to make sure I'm not getting any pleats. And I look at the back also. Again, checking for pleats.

So we'll take out our pins. Now I do not clip the seams. There's really no need for that. And remember that if you have hand dyed or boutique fabrics, that they don't like to stretch nearly as much as other quilting fabrics do. So we're just gonna turn our mat over so that we can iron this.

And I'm simply going to press it to the darker color, which is my blue. Push it over and I want the seam to go all the way over to one side, I'm not gonna open it up or anything. So we're just going to press that seam all the way over to the darker fabric. And again, I'm really glad that my piece is a little wider than I need it to be because I can always trim it down. But of course, I can't grow it if I've made it too narrow.

And so this way, I've got plenty of room to play with. We'll go ahead and just set that on the wall with the rest of our pieces. And now we can move on to the X blocks. For the X blocks and remember, those are the little ones. These are our small three inch blocks here and they are not pieced on the back.

They are actually top stitched on the surface. So we're gonna start with a background that is the actual size we need it to be. So it's the finished size, plus a 1/2 inch. And then we're gonna have a few strips and these strips could be the same color or they could be two different colors, it's up to you. I tend to work with strips that are about an inch wide but you could go wider too and you could even go narrower.

What we're going to be doing is we're gonna stitch them down, flip them over to cover the seam allowance and then flip them over again and then we're gonna top stitch. So we'll have to change our threads. So I've chosen a thread color that pretty much goes with all the colors that I'm using right now. So we'll go ahead and stitch on our first strip. And I can put that at any angle I want.

and I don't want it to be perfect-looking, I want it to be funky-looking. So I can just set it at some sort of angle. And then I'm just going to use the raw edge of my strip as my guide for my stitching. And again, I'll use a 1/4 inch seam allowance. Now I'm going to be doing top stitching next, so I'm gonna go ahead and change my thread out real quick so that I don't forget to do that.

I'll keep the same thread in the bobbin, it'll be on the backside of the block and it won't show. All right, so now what I want to do is I wanna turn this over but I wanna make sure I have no raw edges. So I'm going to fold the raw edge up to the seam that I just sewed and do a little bit of a finger press and then fold the whole thing over and then iron. It's just so easy and it yields such a nice block. So now I'm simply gonna top stitch, right along this edge that's not stitched down.

And if you've never top stitched before, generally you can use the inside edge of your foot and line that up right along the edge that you're stitching and it's gonna give you a nice top stitch. So there's our first leg of our X. And you can see that the top stitching is just right along that edge. So now I'm gonna set my next strip down and again, I want this to be funky. So I'm not gonna do it perfectly across so that it ends up with a really tidy X.

I want it to be a weird X. So I'm gonna sort of offset it here. So again, I'm going to fold over that raw edge to the seam and then fold it over again. Now you wanna make sure that you're folding it over in such a way that it's going to cover up the raw edge of the opposite side of the strip. So there we go and now we just top stitch and we'll be done.

Now at this point, I top stitch all of the sides. So I'm doing the side of the one I just sewed on and then I'll do the side that is where it's sewn onto the fabric. So that two sides of each strip have top stitching on them. So there's our block. And now all I have to do is cut off the excess and you can use your rotor cutter or your scissors.

Get rid of all my threads at the same time. And there's our X block. See how fun and easy that is? Nice and tidy on the back and ready to go. So now we're gonna move on to the square in a square.

Now this block takes a little bit longer than the others and I'm gonna kind of run you through it. Here you see a couple of them. And this first one here, it has a center square, a first round and a second round. When I got that second round on, it was large enough. I only needed them to be 4.1/2 inches.

But these weren't large enough with that second round, so I added a third round. So there's the center, the first round, the second round and the third round. I start with something sort of square in the center and it doesn't have to be square, but somewhere near square is good. And then I had some scraps leftover from piecing some of the stars that I pieced earlier, so I'm gonna use those first. And I'm simply gonna show you here, how this is going to work.

So these are gonna go around but instead of putting them on square, we're gonna put them on in angles. And then we're gonna have these. And then after these are sewn on, we'll square it up real quickly and then we're gonna add these on, opposite sides. and then we're gonna add these on, opposite sides. And then here, I think I need to find another one.

And then we'll finish with these. So remember, we're gonna be working at funky angles. Now it's funny, I'm a pinner when it comes to things trying to be really kind of, I don't wanna use the word exact because that's not really it but just really precise and neat. But otherwise I don't pin and I'm not much of an ironer either, I do a lot of finger pressing. So that's what we're gonna do in between is finger pressing.

So I'm gonna put my first side on, at a weird angle. Oh, let's change this thread real fast. We don't need that decorative thread. So I've got my first piece at an angle. And I'm going to clip the thread off, clip the excess in the seam allowance here.

And flip it over and finger press. Now I'm gonna sew on the opposite side and this is gonna look like nothing while you're making it. You're just gonna be flabbergasted as to how it's going to turn into a square. But trust me, it will. So this is going on at a different angle.

And again, we're gonna trim that seam allowance. And finger press. Okay, so now I have two opposite sides on and it's time to put the remaining two sides on. And again, I'm putting it on at an angle instead of straight on the center square. Now all of this excess needs to be cut off.

So anything that's to the right of the seam allowance needs to go, otherwise it's just gonna end up really bulky underneath the block. So now I'll flip that over and finger press. And you can see when I finger press, I start in the middle and work in both directions. That's the best way to get a nice, tight finger press. And our last side here, and I have the opportunity here to really increase the angle one way or the other on the center.

So I'm gonna do it now. And cut off that excess. And finger press again. So that's our first round. And as we come back here to the table, I'm gonna go ahead and press that real quick.

And I can cut this into a square sort of, by scissors or with a rotary cutter and I'm just gonna do it with scissors. So now it's ready for its next round. I happen to think that I can probably cut one of these in half and it'll be pretty big, since I can't seem to find my fourth piece. So we're gonna sew all the way around now, to do the second round. And again, cutting that seam so that we don't have all that excess.

Finger press and opposite side. At an angle, always an angle. Now if I'm doing a whole lot of these, I will string piece. I'll put the first piece on all the centers, then do all the trimming, then do the finger pressing as I go to add the second piece onto all the centers and so on. So as we're looking at this, we can see where our angles are.

This one's angling down and so we probably don't want this one to angle down. We probably want it to angle the opposite direction. And that's about what we'll get, so that's nice. Again, at an angle. Trim that seam allowance and then press it and do our final go around.

Now when you're thinking about making these square in a squares, if you have an idea of what size you want that square to be, when it's finished, you wanna start with a center square that's about a 1/3 the size of the finished square. So if your square is gonna be six inches, start with a center square that's two. And then you're going to have rectangles or try, excuse me, squares that you'll cut in half into triangles. And those square should be the same, the first round should be the same size as the center. So if your center is two inches, cut more two inch squares and they don't have to be exact.

So you can rip if you want to or just use scraps and then cut those squares in half and that will yield the four triangles you need for the outside. Then the next square is gonna be an inch bigger than the last square. And then cut them in half, into two triangles again. And then the final round will be an inch bigger than the previous square. So for this block, I would have a two inch square in the middle, two inch squares for the first round of triangles, three inch squares for the second round of triangles and four inch squares for the final round of triangles.

And those are just guesstimates, they're quite a bit large. And again, you are gonna waste some fabric. But again, I think it's worth it for these wonderful, funky blocks. So I'm gonna trim this to somewhat square again. And add my final round.

Now you'll notice when I go to lay these triangles down, that I try to keep the point, the short point of the triangle near the center of the block. If I come way over here and the point is way off to one side, then when I'm finished, I'm gonna have a very funky shaped block that is probably gonna be long rather than squarish and it may not be the size I need it to be. So when I lay this down, I try to keep that center somewhere near the center of the block. And again, I want to lay it down at an angle. Trim my seam allowance.

Finger press. Now if we were making a traditional square in a square, we'd look at this little corner being cut off of the previous square and we think that's a mistake. It's not a mistake when you're freestyle piecing. Freestyle piecing, anything goes and it's not a mistake if you say it's not a mistake. So you get to do whatever you wanna do.

So I'm gonna do the opposite side here at a different angle. And trim seam allowance away. And finger press. Okay, last two sides. And remember to cut away everything that's to the right of the seam allowance.

And you don't have to go to the rotary cutter to do that, it doesn't have to be a perfect seam allowance. Finger press. Now I look at this and I can determine how I want my last angle to be, if I want it to go this direction or that direction. This previous one is going in that direction, so I think I want this one to go in the opposite direction. And we'll get rid of everything to the right of the seam allowance.

Then we're ready to press and then to trim it to its actual size. And that's a great looking block. So I'll turn this over. Now when it comes to trimming it to its size, one of the things that I'll do is my size for this trim is 4.1/2 inches. And I'm gonna use this ruler here and I'm gonna use the corner.

You can see how well-used my rulers are here. And what I need to know is what is the middle of 4.1/2? The middle of 4.1/2 or a half of 4.1/2 is 2.1/4. And so I've put a little black dot right here at the intersection of 2.1/4. And if that dot is somewhere near the middle of my block, then I know that I'm gonna get an even cut all the way around.

So I'm gonna put that somewhere near the middle of my block. Now as I'm doing that, I'm gonna move the ruler in different directions so that I can make sure that I'm going to be able to get 4.1/2 inches everywhere. So I might have to change the block into different directions so that I can get that 4.1/2 inches. So, here we go. Well I can get 4.1/2 inches but my dot's nowhere near the center.

Ah, I don't care. Again, this is freestyle piecing. So I've trimmed two sides and I turned those two sides around and I'm gonna put the two trimmed or the corner of the trimmed in the intersection of 4.1/2. And then I can trim the other two sides. Now as I'm doing this, I'm seeing that I'm way too far over here.

So I'm gonna re-trim this side after I've trimmed this side. I'm gonna move this out. Go back to trimming again on the first two sides, that intersection at 4.1/2. There and there and now my dot is right there in the center. So I just must have had it offset before.

And there we go, there's one of our wonderful square in a square in a square, in a square blocks. So now we're gonna go ahead and piece our fabulous, funky stars. Remember that these stars are based on the Ohio Star. And it's a star that has eight star tips in it. We have background squares, there are eight of those also.

And then we have a center square. Now when it comes to figuring out the sizes for cutting for these squares, all you have to understand is that the square is basically a nine patch. That means that it has nine units. One, two, three, four five, six, seven, eight, nine, that are all the same size. Now the units may be doing different things but they're all the same size, so it's a nine patch.

We want to be able to choose a finished size for the block that can be easily divided into nine. So I probably wouldn't wanna go with a five inch block or a seven inch block because nine does not divide evenly into those really well, so that we can get a number that's easy to cut. Whereas six and nine go very well. If we put three, because there's three squares, divided into six, we get two. That means that each square is going to finish at two inches and that's what we're working with.

To all of these finished sizes, you add a 1/2 inch so that you have a 1/4 inch seam allowance around all sides. So I'm gonna cut eight background squares, that are 2.1/2 inches and that's what I've got here. Now my center square is going to be the exact same size and that's what this one is for. And then I'm simply gonna cut some strips or a strip of fabric that's the same width and that's what I'll use for the star tips. So let's go ahead and start piecing those tips.

Now four of these backgrounds don't get pieced and four do. And I'm going to string piece, that means that I'm going to push through one side of each of the backgrounds with one star tip on each of them. And what I need to know is approximately where the middle of the block is. And this just helps me to kind of place things in a way that is going to be attractive when I'm done. So I wanna make sure that when I lay down my fabric for my star tip and my star tip is going to be on this side when it's flipped over.

And it can be at any number of angles, big wide angles, tall thin angles. But I wanna make sure that I'm getting somewhere near the middle on the bottom portion of this block. So I can start anywhere I want to on the top. I can start on this side or I can start along the top of this square but I wanna kind of finish somewhere around this halfway mark on the bottom of the square. So I'm gonna make this one be somewhat short and somewhat fat.

Again, I'm going to use the raw edge of my top fabric as my seam guide. And I'm gonna use approximately, a 1/4 inch seam allowance. And then I'm just gonna let that string through. Take another background, this one, I'm gonna do a long, thin point or tip on this one. And so I try to do each one slightly differently so that my star tips will all look different from each other.

But unfortunately, when it comes down to it, there just aren't that many different angles you can use on a little 2.1/2 inch square. Now the trick to making these fit together and look really nice is to not trim your seam allowances until after you've trimmed the unit. So I'm gonna leave the seam allowance there. I'm not gonna cut this away but I am gonna flip the fabric over and finger press. Now my other side needs to crossover along the bottom edge of the block, the first side.

So when I'm done, I want something that looks something like this. So I wanna make sure that when I set my fabric down, this top blue fabric, that it crosses over this bottom blue fabric. So those are done. And I'm gonna go ahead and finger press them again. So I have these four, somewhat messy looking units and I could go to my cutting board and use my rotary cutter to cut these out perfectly.

But I think it's a lot faster to simply use your scissors. So I'm just gonna use the edge of that background fabric to cut away all the excess of the star fabric. So this is what it's going to yield on the front but I also wanna get rid of that seam allowance that's back there. So I'm going to, at this time, cut away the seam allowance. Now one side cuts all the way off but the other one has a Y seam through it.

So you have to cut it sort of in the shape of a Y. You could always leave the seam allowances if you want to but it does make the machine quilting a little bit more difficult if you have all those extra layers to go through and even more difficult if you're gonna hand quilt. Okay, so now I'm ready to piece my star together. So I'm gonna bring it here and just set it on the table for you to see. We have our four corners, our center square and then each of our star tip sections, like so, so we'll just sew them together in rows and then sew those rows together.

We'll finish up the rows. So now I know that a lot of you are ready to head over to the ironing board now but I don't like to iron my blocks while they're in rows. I don't iron until I'm done with the whole block. I feel like it makes the block actually get misshapen the more you iron it. So I try to iron it as little as possible.

So I'm simply gonna turn the seams so that they butt into each other. So here's the bottom row. And naturally, the bottom row, the two side pieces want to come out this way so that the seams are going in that direction. In the center, it's the opposite because there's all this bulk in here, it's trying to go in. So I'm gonna have it do exactly what it thinks it needs to do.

And I'm just gonna butt those seams up, turn one in one direction and one the other and place a pin there. Now I don't know about you but I'm the boss of my fabric, I'm the boss on my sewing machine, I'm the boss of everything when I'm in my studio. It's the only place on the boss of it. And so I make sure that my blocks match up. If I have to ease or pull or do whatever I have to do, I wanna make sure that my blocks are square when I'm done and I do not have to waste time squaring them up or having to reshape them or anything.

And again, that center is moving in on this row and the new row, the seams are moving out. And we'll butt up again, lay flat and pin. Now the pins that I use are ultra-fine silt pins. So you probably see that I'm sewing right over them and some of you are freaking out about that too. These are so fine that even if I hit them with my needle, it won't break the needle.

It might break the pin but it won't break the needle. And I've always thought, what's the sense of pinning something if you have to remove the pin before you get to it? So I do sew right over those things. So our block is done. There we go and we're ready to press it.

So we'll turn this over. And you can see from the back, that this is already moving in, these are already moving out because of the way we sewed them. And you can see that this wants to move in. So I'm gonna have it do what it wants to do because that means that there's less bulk in the direction that it's moving towards. So I'm gonna press lightly from the back to get that seam moving in the direction that it's supposed to move in.

And press lightly from the back on this side and then I'll press it from the front. Now I'm one of those people who tries not to move the iron when it's down because that becomes ironing instead of pressing. So here, I can see that I have a little bit of a pleat. I'll just iron that out and we're done. So we have this wonderful, wonderful star block and it's really easy to make and really fun.

And we have all these really different, funky looking little star tips and the block is so interesting. So we have just one more thing we're going to piece and then I'll show you what the rest of this looks like up on the wall. So you remember earlier, I was showing you this really fun, high-contrast, bright kind of fluorescent yellow with white. And these are strips that are cut at angles. So you'll see that at one end, all the whites are narrower and one end they're wider.

And on this end, all the neon yellows are wider and on this end, they're narrower. So when I cut these fabrics, I layer them on top of each other and I simply cut them at angles. And so you can see here that these two nestled into each other, like so when they were coming off of the yardage. What I do is I make sure that my narrow end is never narrower than 3/4 of an inch. This is important because if you have a 1/4 inch seam allowance on one side and a 1/4 inch seam allowance on the other side, you are gonna eat up half of that 3/4 of an inch and you'll just yield a 1/4 inch, finished on the front.

And then I try not to get wider than about oh, maybe an inch and 3/4 to two inches on the wide side. Otherwise it becomes too chunky on the wide side. So I'll just so one of these on and then we'll cut this so that it fits our quilt and we can see what it looks like inserted in there. So the next thing I'm gonna need here, I have wide white and I have thin white over here. So I'm gonna put thick yellow and thin white.

And no pinning here, you're just gonna lay it on there. We don't really care if it matches up on the ends because we're gonna be making this bigger than we need it to be so that we can trim it to all the various sizes that we're going to use it for. We're essentially making strata or a striped fabric. And we'll just flip this over and press it. We want all the seems to be going in one direction.

This is one of those new irons that likes to make weird noises. Okay, so we have our new strips sewn on and this is ready now to cut, to put into some of our blank spots on our quilt on the design wall. So to do that, we need to know where it's going to go and how big it needs to be. So we are gonna go back to our original design that we did. And we're gonna be putting some in right here, here and here.

Well, we need to know how big all of these things are. This one's pretty simple because this is a six inch finished star and a three inch finished strip here. So we know that it's nine inches finished. That means it's gonna be cut 9.1/2 inches long. Here, we have a four inch square and this is half of that four inch square.

So that's two inches wide and we have to add that half inch, so it's 2.1/2 inches. So we're gonna cut a unit that's 2.1/2 inches by 9.1/2 inches. My first thing that I have to do is either find something on this unit that is already true or square or cut something that's true or square. Now I'm the type of person who's going to say, well I'm gonna make something true or square. And let's see if I can do it just by laying it on there.

Probably not, because I'm gonna lose a lot of fabric there. So we'll go ahead and just set it on here and I'm going to move it over. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut a piece that is gonna be wide enough for my two and a half, I'm just gonna cut it off the edge here and make one straight edge. So here's my straight edge now. So I know that this side is true and now I need this to be 2.1/2 inches wide.

And I don't measure off the mat, I usually just measure off the ruler. So while I'm here, I'm gonna edge this down and I'm a gonna go ahead and true up this end also. And now I just need to measure 9.1/2 inches. And that's gonna be right there. Now, as I look at this, 9.1/2 is going to be right here.

I'm gonna lose the whole portion of this little bit of lime green, this yellowy lime color here. So I'm actually gonna push this over just a bit and then I'll cut off a little bit of excess down here also. It's just gonna yield a more attractive end result. Okay, so let's put this guy in place. He's gonna go right in there.

Now you can see, as soon as I put it in there, that makes everything really, really lively. So now I can't wait to see what this one on top looks like. And it, here we have a four-inch square. So we know it's gonna be four inches long. And this is a four inch square and we're using three inches of that square.

We know that because these are three inches and it's just kind of how the math goes together. So we're gonna cut something, we have to add that seam allowance. So 3.1/2 inches by 4.1/2 inches. Now in this bottom area, the stripes are going from top to bottom. Here, I want the stripes to go side to side.

So again, I know that this side that I cut off is true, so I can use it as the true area. And I'm gonna cut off a piece that is bigger than the four and a half by three and a half. I'm gonna make it 3.1/2 inches wide. So I'll be cutting here and here, but I've given myself about five inches here so I can cut off that length wherever I want to. Remember, the strata is just like a piece of fabric.

So we'll turn that over and now we're gonna measure our 4.1/2 inches, which is right there. Now again, we're in the same position. If I cut right here, I'll lose that whole section of white. It'll get pieced into the seam allowance. And I really like that skinny section of white, so I'm actually gonna move this down more than a 1/4 of an inch past that white so that we see the white.

And I'll trim that and then we'll remeasure again for that four and a half. I'll turn it around, find my four and a half again. Now here, I'm gonna end with white also but this is a really wide white, so it's not gonna all get lost. And that will go there. So this is going to go in this area.

And again, instant perk up. I'm really liking that, it's drawing this border pieces really close in and it makes it look really nice. So our last little piece is this guy here and it is, we've got a three inch square and a one inch strip. So that's four inches, by one inch. So we're gonna cut it four and a half by one and a half.

So I'm just gonna cut where I already cut before and get that 4.1/2 inches. There we go. So that's looking really cool. So I'm gonna run and grab my fabrics real quick and we'll choose the fabrics that we're gonna use in some of the negative spaces that are left in the border and then we'll be done.