Aurora Sisneros

Triangle Quilt Session 3: Seam Allowance Trick

Aurora Sisneros
Duration:   16  mins

Description

What’s the deal with bulk? Why is it important? In this session Aurora will start joining blocks together, and talking about which way to iron them and will make a mini quilt!!

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In this section we're going to talk about block layout and seam allowance. I wanna show you this book that I absolutely love. This is "The Half-Square Triangle" book written by Jenny Baker. I just want to flip to a page to show you how many options you have for your half square triangles. Now, if you look at these you can spot the half square triangle.

So here's the square, right. So triangle, triangle in each one of these. Now these are all offset in white so that you can see them very easily. But this is what I mean when I say this is one of the most versatile blocks that you can use because there are so many different designs that you can create out of them by just positioning them differently. Now, the more intricate your design is, the smaller you want your blocks to be so that you can make gorgeous designs like this one all over your quilt but the pages just go on and on and on.

So the one that's on the cover here is one of my favorites. It doesn't involve a whole lot of decision-making. And you'll notice that it's the same one we have here. All of the blocks are facing the exact same direction and all I've done here is put them together in groups of six. Okay and then I sewed the groups of six together.

So we're gonna talk about sewing these together. I am going to lay my blocks out first. So I'm just gonna start with a little bit. We're gonna kind of make a mini quilt here. So I'm gonna lay these out.

And I think this is how I would like my block layout to look, something like that. Okay, so again, we're just keeping it simple. We're gonna put all of the the triangles facing the same way and then we're going to start to sew them together. Now I like to lay them out because as soon as I push this over to the side here and I put one block on top of the other, you don't really know where to sew. So this is where pinning can come in handy.

So I know I wanna sew this block to this block on this seam, so I'm going to get it lined up real nice. And then I'm just gonna get one pin in it. Okay, this way you can do multiple blocks at once. So I'm going to fold this one, pin that one, hold this one, line them up nice and even on the edges and get a pin in there. Okay, then you could potentially do 30, 40 of these, stack them all up and take them over and run them through your machine.

So I'm gonna grab the first one. We're gonna continue to use our quarter-inch quilting foot. Oops, I have a little thread gunk going on here. Let me get rid of that. Got a little bit of thread vomit.

That's what I lovingly call it. See if you can see that, let's get a close-up of this. Now this is a side note. This is not part of this class. However, this will happen to you quite often.

It doesn't matter how expensive your machine is or how cheap your machine is. Sometimes you just get thrown up on by the thread. So I'm just gonna clip this off. And that usually means my machine has come unthreaded and I can see that it has. So I'm just gonna quickly tuck that back down under there, all right.

Let's give that guy another shot and see if it's done throwing up on me. All right, we'll tuck this under. Much better. There's number one. Number two.

Number three. Again, we have a very flag-like a theme going on here. So I'm just gonna separate these. Okay, now let's see if we can't get these back in place where they belong. Let's see this goes like that.

And that is upside down. That goes like that. Okay, so now I'm going to go ahead and sew this guy to this guy, this guy to this guy and this guy to this guy. I'm waiting to press these. Normally what I would recommend is that after you sew a seam like this, you would take your stack and you would iron it before you sew any other piece to it, you wanna iron it.

However, in this case, I have a little trick for spreading out the bulk in the seam allowance that I think is really important to point out. So I'm gonna wait an iron them all at the same time after I stitch these together. So we have row one. Row two. And finally row three.

All right, let's pull these out and clip them. All right, so there's row one. Oops, it helps if you take it off the machine as well. There's row two. Okay, so here's what's gonna happen.

I am going to sew this row to this row right here. Okay, this means that there are going to be this seam here is going to overlap with that seam there. And this seam here is going to overlap with that seam there. I want to make a very conscious effort to iron the seam allowances this way on this one, this way on this one and this way on this one, okay. The reason is they will lock together and look so much nicer.

So I'm just going to move these out of the way like this. I'm gonna bring my iron in. Okay, so you kinda have to pay attention on this one. I'm going to flip this one over and I'm going to iron everything this way. Now notice I'm placing my iron on this block and I'm just gonna pull a little bit so that it's nice and flat and then I can get a nice press on it, okay.

Place your iron, give a little tug, run your iron over the seam as you kind of tug it open. Okay, now these little corners are kind of difficult 'cause you see if I iron too much I'll over iron that one open. So you just got to kinda go carefully. Okay, so let's think about this. These are going to the left.

So I want these to go to the right but since I have a hard time ironing this way I'm just gonna flip it around just like this. Iron these this way, just like that. Okay and then these go back the opposite direction which is, oh boy, I better look. These need to go to the left again, okay. Got it, this goes here like this.

So this is why it's nice to do these in sort of an assembly line fashion. So you can kind of keep track where all your blocks are. So well, let's see, this one goes here. This one can go here. Yep, that looks just fine.

Okay, so we're gonna talk about two things right now. We're gonna talk about lining up the blocks and the seam allowances. But we're also gonna talk about this little problem which you can see rearing its ugly head right there. Okay, see how those are not even? No problem.

This block needs to get sewn to this block, this row, to this row. I'm gonna take this row. I'm gonna flip it over, just like this. Now I want you to peak under here, okay. The seam allowance on this one is going this direction.

The seam allowance on this one is going the opposite direction. If I hold it up like that you can kind of see, see how they're opposite? That's fantastic. The reason why you wanna do that is you can kind of scooch this block over and they'll lock together. If I peel this back, if you run your finger across here because the seam allowance is under this square, this is raised.

But over here, this side is raised. So they'll kind of, they're like two little walls coming together and they match perfectly. And then you know you have a good seam. So once we do that, we're going to get a pin in there and we'll get a pin on the edge here as well. So that nothing moves while we're sewing it.

Oh, I've got some threads here. Now, this one, we're gonna do the same thing. But look at the problem we have here. See that little guy is rearing its head. And in fact, it's funny because this one is actually a little high too.

See how that one's a little taller? It's not a problem. What you're gonna do is you're gonna line up your quarter-inch foot with the shortest side. So I'm just gonna split the difference here. See how this comes back down over here.

I'm just gonna line up with that one. And instead of running my foot along the edge of the white, I'm gonna move it and run it along the edge of this orange square. And it's gonna totally make things straight. So a lot of people ask me if they should cut these to be perfectly square but you don't need to. As long as you just split the difference like that then you can just run it under your sewing machine and you can save time by not cutting a bunch of little pieces off.

All right, we're gonna sew this one now. And I'm gonna be very careful once I get to that middle square. So I'm just making sure my seam allowances are facing the right direction. Okay, here's that little area right there where that is just a little bit higher than this one. Okay, so we've got this just a little bit higher than this one.

So I'm gonna make sure I run my foot over this. So I'm gonna start to sew and I'm gonna make sure my foot is on top of the white sewing right next to that square, problem solved. Okay, trim this off. So now the next one. Oh my gosh, it's cute already.

Okay, the next one is this one. We're gonna join this to this one and we know they will fit together because we ironed them properly. So we're going to pin them thus and then we're going to stitch this together. Oh, right so those are pinned. Let's run them through.

I have a little nub kind of hanging out right here. So I'm just gonna lift my foot and lower it so that my fin that's on the side of my foot is right on top of it. And I'll sew right past it. Let me use my pin to kind of tuck my seam allowance down there. Sew right over that.

All right, now this one's done. Okay, so in the case of the quilt that you see hanging next to me, this is a nine-inch block that I created, okay. Over here, I did six together, okay. Now this is important for you to know because I'm going to iron these a certain way. Here's my block.

I'm gonna iron both of these to the left. So let's get this ironed, seam allowances to the left. Okay, so when I set this up right, all of my seam allowances are ironed upward, okay. These two seam allowances are ironed upward. When you make another block to sew on the side of it, iron those downward, okay.

This can get very tedious but it really makes a big difference. If you look at this quilt over here we have this orange block and we have this blue block next to it. I ironed these together. This seam here between these two goes that way. This one goes that way.

This one goes that way. So I sewed them all together. They locked up really nice. This one I did the same way but when I sewed these two together, this, this, these two seam allowances go up and these go down, okay. So you can see how you'll start to build your seam allowances.

This makes it so your corners where everything meets, they're not that bulky. Sometimes they can poke out and look puffy. But if you really concentrate on your seam allowance then it will make everything lay nice and flat. Plus it's easier to quilt. So in the next section, we are going to get our quilt back.

We're gonna find some batting. We're going to use our top quilt here and we're going to sew them together in what I like to call the quilt sandwich. And we're gonna quilt the whole thing.

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