Stitch and Flip Quilt Tutorial

Stitch and flip is an easy technique that you'll definitely want to have in your quilter's toolbox of skills. Stitch and flip is a method that uses squares and rectangles to end up with triangular shapes, but you never have to cut or sew triangles and you never have to sew along a bias edge I'll show you today a number of different types of units that you can make with stitch and flip. I want to let you know that I won't be talking specifically about dimensions of the patches that I'm using today. The dimensions of the patches will depend upon the pattern that you're using, so you'll want to refer to your own pattern and cut your patches to those dimensions. The first unit we'll talk about is a regular flying geese unit. A flying geese unit, if it's the normal, average kind is usually twice as wide as it is tall. So in order to make a flying geese unit, the pieces that you need are the rectangle and two squares. And so you'll start with the rectangle and one square and you layer them right sides together, and you want to mark on the square from corner to corner, just like so. It doesn't matter, if you wanna mark everything before you layer it up, you can do that too. I don't think that pen actually made a mark, so we'll try that again with the pencil. So you want to mark from corner to corner like so and then what you'll do is sew from corner to corner on that line. You would actually use matching thread and I've used contracting thread just so that you could see it more clearly today. You want to sew on the line from corner to corner and then you'll take your scissors and you'll trim this little part off. So this is what you're left with and then you'll want to flip and press, and there's your first step. So then you'll take the other square and you'll lay it in the same way, and you want to sew in an opposite direction from this corner to this corner. Sew right on the line, it'll look like this. And then again, you'll want to trim and press and you end up with the perfect flying geese unit. So that's the very first one. The next unit I want to talk to you about is a square in a square unit. It's the same idea. For this one, you'll want to start with the brown or dark center and the four corners, so you have a total of five patches. So the first thing you do in the same way is to lay a light square on each corner, mark using your ruler from corner to corner, and then sew on the line, trim and get rid of these, flip these out and press. And then you'll want to take the next two squares and lay them on the opposite corners like so. You'll mark again, unless you've already marked, take another one. So then you'll sew those two, trim and get rid of those, and press, and there you have a square in a square. After square in a square, things start to get a little more interesting. This is a parallelogram. So it's really easy to do a parallelogram with stitch and flip. What you need is a rectangle and two squares. So you'll start with the rectangle, put each square at the end with right sides together, and then you'll want to mark. Now, because you want a parallelogram, you want to be sure to mark this way and then leave the ruler oriented in the same direction and mark this way. And then you want to sew on both lines, first, this one, take it out of the machine, and then on this one, corner to corner. So then what you'll get is something that looks like this and you'll want to trim and get rid of these, press these like so, and you have a parallelogram. This is really nice because if you had to spend the time to make a template for this shape in the center, it would be much more time-consuming, so that's where you really start to save some time with the stitch and flip method. A snowball block is another thing you can do that's very similar. We'll kind of go through this one quickly because I think you'll see the idea. A square gets laid on each corner and you can lay all four of them out at the same time. You can mark ahead of time or you can mark right now. Sew from corner to corner on all four brown squares, you'll end up with this. You've trimmed and gotten rid of your little corners, and so then you'll press these out and you have a snowball block. A snowball is a great alternate block. It's a good connecting block because it can form some secondary designs in your quilt, so that's a really fun one to play with. And after the snowball block, we have some units that I don't think really have a name, but it's this shape where you'd have to make a template if you couldn't use the stitch and flip, so you'll see how handy stitch and flip is. So to make these two units, which are mirror images of one another, you'll need two rectangles and then two squares. So you're going to lay the squares and you'll want to mark here to here, and here to here, and you'll want to sew on the marks, and this is what you'll end up with. You'll want to trim and get rid of, and we'll flip these open and this is what you'll have. Now, here's a place that I want to talk about something that you should be aware of with stitch and flip. You can see this fabric that sort of reminds me of cattails. This is a directional fabric and what that means is that if you look at the fabric this way, it's not the same as if you rotate it and look at it this way. There are motifs on the fabric that go in a particular direction, and so you can't just rotate it any old way and expect that things will remain the same. So it's not a problem to use directional fabrics, but you just want to be aware of how they act and what you want them to do in your quilt. If you look at these two units that we just made, when we laid the first squares down, we had the lines in the fabric going in this direction. So when we flip them up, the lines don't go in this direction anymore, now they go in this direction. And if you compare this patch, you can see that we laid this fabric in a different direction. Let's look at it from this side. Here, the fabric motifs go this way and here, they go in this direction. When you flip them up, they don't match. So you can decide to have your directional fabrics all match, or you can have them oppose one another, that's totally up to you, but it's just a good thing to be aware of because it makes a difference in how the units look once they're finished. So that's the unit with no name. And then we move on to this unit. This is another one that saves you a lot of time with stitch and flip. I don't think it has a real name again, but the idea is that you end up with the strip across the center and just to the side of the finished unit. So what you need to begin with are a large square, actually two large squares, and a smaller square. So those are the things that you need to start with to end up with this unit. And the first thing you'll want to do is just make a half-square triangle. After you have your half-square triangle, you're going to take your smaller square and lay it on the corner, right sides together. Again, you'll mark from corner to corner, just like we did before. You'll sew on the line and then we end up with this. So you want to trim these off, get rid of them, and press, and that's how you end up with that little unit. A big time saver. There are a few things that can go wrong when you do stitch and flips, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how to remedy some of those things. One of the problems that can occur is you can do everything correctly, but when you actually get ready to flip, you may find that this lighter patch doesn't come all the way to the corner of the underneath patch the way you'd like it to. So one way to remedy that is to cut away only this top patch when you do the trimming. You leave the bottom triangle that you would normally trim away, you leave that in place, and then when you press this over, you can use that bottom one as your benchmark and continue your piecing because you know that that edge is accurate. So that's a way to sort of cope with that problem. Another thing you can do if you're having trouble with accuracy, you can see here that I marked the line from corner to corner, but when I sewed, I actually nudged the line toward the corner that will be cut off and what that does is it creates more space for this triangle to flip, and it gives you more space over here to fill out the patch accurately. So that's another coping way is just to nudge that seam line over ever so slightly before you flip and press. If you're making a really large project, the idea of marking corner to corner on hundreds of squares can be daunting, so there are a couple of things you can do if you don't want to mark all of those squares. And we'll go to the machine now and I'll show you a really easy way to sew from corner to corner without having to mark the squares. The easiest way to avoid marking the squares corner to corner for stitch and flip is to mark the sewing machine instead. The line that you want to mark on the sewing machine comes out from the needle straight towards your belly, so you want the line coming from the needle and your belly to form a right angle. The best thing to do is to mark your sewing machine temporarily with tape. So this is a piece of white tape that I used a red marker on so that you could see the edge clearly. So with the needle in the center position, I place the red edge of the tape there and I run it straight down the bed of the machine towards myself. And you can see then I'm going to sew these stitch and flip patches together and the square isn't marked, but it doesn't need to be because I line up this first corner under the needle, put the presser foot down, and as I sew, I just advance the patches, always keeping this little corner lined up against the red line, so I can sew all the way up without any problem without needing to mark. You can mark your machine with a permanent marker as long as you're absolutely certain that you're marking in the right spot, so you want to be really, very certain before you do it with the permanent marker. So next time you come across stitch and flip instructions in some patterns, you'll know exactly what to do and you can save yourself all kinds of time.