Please refer to the pattern for all measurements! If you’re making the Kinship + LOVE version (buy your Kinship: 100 Block Fusion Sampler here), follow the steps in the Addendum (pages 9-11).

Refer to Sewing Long Seams Without Stretching Them for tips on sewing these blocks together. If you keep the stretching to a minimum, the quilt will lay flat, and you (or your long-arm artist) will have an easier time with the quilting!

Refer to page 7 of the pattern for drawings of the final assembly, or page 11 of the addendum if you’re making the Kinship + LOVE version.

Before you sew these together, take a quick look at the #colorblocklovequilt and hashtag on Instagram. A few people have used some sashing between the blocks, and it looks fabulous! Remember, this is YOUR quilt, so you get to finish it YOUR way!

And on to your final top construction:

At this point, you’re essentially dealing with a GIANT four-patch!

Sew V and E together, and press towards the E:

Sew L and O together, and press towards the L:

Pressing the seams in opposite directions allow you to “lock” them and nail the intersection of all four blocks:

I’m not normally a drill sergeant about accuracy, but in this quilt, missing the center points by more than a thread or two will eyeball you. If you can live with being eyeballed by your quilt points, carry on! If not, pin it tight and sew slowly to keep it in line!!

This is my Kinship + LOVE version:

This colorfully sashed version is by Linda Timms of Blue Barn Quilt Co:

Don’t forget to post your work on Instagram! For Colorblock LOVE use #colorblocklovequilt , #colorblockloveqal (or #colourblocklove if you speak the Queen’s English!) and if you’re making the Kinship + LOVE version, add #kinshiplovequilt .

If you post your quilt according to the instructions here, you’ll be in the running for some lovely prizes!

The post Tutorial for Colorblock LOVE – Putting it Together appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

The post Tutorial for Colorblock LOVE – Making the E appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

The post Tutorial for Colorblock LOVE – Making the V appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

The post Tutorial for Colorblock LOVE – Making the O appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

The post Tutorial for Colorblock LOVE – Making the L appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

There comes a time in your quilt-making adventure where a pattern will call upon you to make a cut that’s longer than your mat or ruler.

Usually, a 24” mat is all you’ll ever need, until you need to make a 30” cut. But rest assured, you can make a cut that’s longer than your mat. Read on for some tips…

Prep the fabric

I’m in the camp of not washing my fabric before I use it (unless I’m making a garment, in which case I wash all the shrink out of it first) so my fabric usually has that little bit of stiffening from the manufacturing process. This is sizing. It’s a bit like like starch, though less crispy, and gives fabric a bit of firmness. The firmer hand means your fabric will wiggle and stretch less than if it was freshly washed. If you prefer to wash your fabric first, then add the sizing back in before you cut it. You can also add starch or sizing to unwashed fabric to give it a boost of firmness before cutting anything long or tricky.

Good old-fashioned spray starch in a can is good when used sparingly, but often quilters use a newer product called Best Press. It comes in different scents (my preference being UN-scented!) and works well in places where you need a more stable fabric – and specifically for long strips that become part of long seams. Use according to the instructions (especially the part about having a clean sole plate on your iron) and start out sparingly until you get used to it.

Align the fabric to your mat

Many of us have been taught to fold fabric in half twice to cut it on a mat that is 18” tall. But every time you fold a fabric, you add another opportunity for inaccuracy to creep in. If your folding technique is not spot-on, you’ll cut a strip that resembles a chevron! Thus, my preference is to fold the fabric only once, selvedge to selvedge.

You can work with this on a smaller mat by rotating the mat to be 24” tall. Your fabric is probably no wider than 44”, which means 22” folded in half, which will fit nicely on a 24” mat.

Fold the fabric once, selvedge to selvedge, and align the fold to a line at the bottom of your mat, with the selvedges at the top. Aligning to the fold will give you the least chance of cutting your strips in to a V shape. I’m right-handed, so if you’re a leftie, these pictures will be a mirror image for you.

Align the ruler to the mat, and make your first cut to give yourself a clean edge.

Cut the strips

ALWAYS have the “good” part of the fabric under your ruler – the part that you’re cutting for, not the leftover. This way, if you veer off or wiggle, you don’t wiggle in the part you need. Also, because we put pressure on the ruler as we cut, what’s underneath doesn’t move much and gets cut more accurately. Wiggling isn’t so critical if you’re cutting a 2” strip (hopefully your pattern gave you a generous fabric quantity) but of you make a wiggle with an 8” cut you might be in danger of needing to shop for more.

If your cut is wider than the ruler you have – for example, you have a 6” ruler, but you need an 8” cut – then stack two rulers together to get the width you need. Place them side by side (in this case a 6” ruler and a 6” ruler) then measure the 8” you need as if the rulers were fused together. Then, firmly holding the ruler closest to the cutting line, cut.

A side note… if your cutter grinds rather than swishes, or you have to go over a cut twice, you NEED a new blade. RIGHT NOW. They are less than the price of a frothy drink at a local cafe, and they are worth every penny in terms of your safety. Read here for more about maintaining your cutters, and here for why you need to close them!

Trim the strips

And now, for the fun. You have a 24” mat, and need a 30” strip. Here are a couple of ways to do that.

Method 1

First, take the selvedge off one end of the strip.

Lay it out on the mat, aligning to the zero line at one end and smoothing it across the mat, along a line. You want the fabric to be neither taut (stretched) nor wrinkly (loose). You might need to go back and iron out the fold in the middle. Flat fabric is CRITICAL to the accuracy, so put some time into making sure you get it flat. At the 24” mark, put a pin in the strip.

Scoot the strip so the pin is at the zero line. Measure out the remainder of the strip – 6 more inches if we’re aiming for a 30” strip – and then cut.

There’s a chance that you’ll be a couple of threads over or under the 30” mark with this, but in the big picture of quilting accuracy, I don’t think this shows up in a way that harms the quilt. When sewing 30” seams, there is ALWAYS easing going on, so a couple of threads-worth has very little impact.

Method 2

Fold the strip so that the part on top is an inch bigger than half the measurement needed. Let me explain with our 30” example: you need a 30” strip, so half of 30 is 15, plus 1 equals 16”. Fold the strip so the top part is about 16”, and the bottom is the rest of the strip.

Align the fold to the zero line. Measure out 15” (half of 30”) and cut. This preserves the remaining strip for something else.

If you don’t care about the leftovers of a long cut, just fold the strip in half, align the selvedges, and cut measuring from the fold. You’ll get 2 smaller leftover pieces instead of one bigger one.

And there you go – a nice 30” strip!

In closing: while I’m a big fan of not owning more than I need in the tools department, I also believe in being equipped as best I can be to make my sewing life easy on me. Thus, my studio includes a 24” x 36” mat, and I have 24” and 36” rulers. If your space and budget allow for a larger mat and ruler, I highly recommend getting them – they’ll make a lot of things a little easier, which, in turn, will make your sewing time more fun!

The post Tutorial – How to Make Long Cuts appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

This post is the first in the 2019 Back to School Blog Hop, and also a tutorial for the Colorblock LOVE QAL!

This is a tutorial for sewing long seams on any quilt.

What’s a long seam? Anything that’s longer than the space you have between the front edge of your machine or table and your needle.

Long seams present an opportunity to introduce stretch into a quilt, and too much stretch is never a good thing. So let’s look a few tips for keeping stretch at bay.

Here’s a quick 10 minute video, and in it I’ve covered all the points below – so you can either read about it, or watch it!

Sewing machine set up

One of the best things you can do to increase your accuracy in general is to expand the bed of your machine. This means get some surface in front of your needle at the same height as the machine bed. You can do this by having the machine in a drop-in sewing table or cabinet, or by adding a supporting table around it. Some machines come with a portable table, and there are some after-market companies like Sew Steady that make them for any machine (in several sizes). Your local sewing machine store will have solutions so pop in and talk to them about it. It’s a solid investment in your accuracy, as I’ll show you a bit further down this post!

Pins

Pinning is ALWAYS a good practice. And by pinning, I don’t mean using clips. Clips are a great solution for really thick things (like the top of a bag or tote with additional layers of batting), but pins are the best solution for precision piecework. Once a pin is in place, it’s very difficult to pull one of the layers out of alignment.

Where should you pin? In all the places that matter: at a minimum, pin each end, and pin the middle. To find the middle, fold the edge where the seam will be in half, and pin or pinch a crease into the middle. Do this on both pieces that make up the seam, and then align and pin the middles once you have pinned the ends.

After that, pin all the places that have to match up, like the points and intersections of blocks.

And then after that, add more pins until you have one every 4 to 6 inches, or about the width of your hand. Yes, this seems like a lot of pins to fuss with, but fussing with pins usually keeps you from fussing with the seam ripper. If you slow down to pin, you seldom need to slow down to rip!

How you hold the fabric

No, this isn’t some secret handshake thingy, it just about having a soft hand with the fabric as it approaches the needle. We often put tension on the fabric as it feeds into the needle – pulling away a bit – but this makes the machine try to grab the fabric while we tug in the opposite direction. And this stretches the fabric.

Instead, line up your work in front of the needle, and hold the layers together in just the space between the edge of your table and the needle, and rather than tugging them away from the needle, hold them down on the table gently as you sew up to your hand. UP TO your hand… not OVER it! And if you didn’t watch the video yet, go do that and this will make more sense!

It’s really frustrating to invest your time and money into making a quilt to have it come out stretched and fitting together poorly. It’s worth taking a few moments to set yourself up for better accuracy because sewing is always more fun when things come together well, and without too much struggle, or seam ripping. Having fun while making things is so important!

Please follow the rest of the 2019 Back To School Blog Hop! Note that these industry peeps are all over the country and world, so be patient if you don’t see their post first thing in *your* morning!

Day 1 – September 1 – Sam Hunter: Sewing Long Seams Without Stretching – huntersdesignstudio.com <<—- you are here!

Day 2 – September 2 – Susan Arnold – Joining Binding the Easy Way – quiltfabrication.com

Day 3 – September 3 – Angie Wilson – Fussy cutting tips and techniques – www.gnomeangel.com

Day 4 – September 4 – Andi Stanfield – No-Mark HST: Let your machine be your guide – truebluequilts.com/blog/

Day 5 – September 5 – Bobbie Gentili – Say YES to Y-seams – geekybobbin.com

Day 6 – September 6 – Mel Beach – 5 Reasons to Say Woo Hoo! to School Glue – pieceloveandhappiness.blogspot.com

Day 7 – September 7 – Laura Piland – 7 Ways to Use a Laser on Your Sewing Machine – www.sliceofpiquilts.com

Day 8 – September 8 – Suzy Webster – How to solve loops in free motion quilting – www.websterquilt.com

Day 9 – September 9 – Tara Miller – Accurate Stitch-and-Flip Corners – quiltdistrict.com

Day 10 – September 10 – Latifah Saafir – Accurate Seams Using Masking Tape! – latifahsaafirstudios.com

Day 11 – September 11 – Sarah Ruiz – The Magic of Glue Basting – saroy.net

Day 12 – September 12 – Jen Shaffer – Ways to stop your ruler from slipping while cutting – patternsbyjen.blogspot.com

Day 13 – September 13 – Cheryl Sleboda – Basics of ruching (a vintage fabric manipulation technique) – muppin.com

Day 14 – September 14 – Raylee Bielenberg – Choosing quilting designs for your quilt – www.sunflowerstitcheries.com

Day 15 – September 15 – Jen Strauser – Accurate and Attractive Machine binding – dizzyquilter.com

Day 16 – September 16 – Jane Davidson – Matching points for all types of intersections – quiltjane.com

Day 17 – September 17 – Teresa Coates – Starch and starch alternatives – teresacoates.com

Day 18 – September 18 – Jen Frost – Benefits of spray basting – faithandfabricdesign.com

Day 19 – September 19 – Sandra Starley – Getting started with Hand Quilting – utahquiltappraiser.blogspot.com

Day 20 – September 20 – Karen Platt – Drunkard’s Path Made Easy – karenplatt.co.uk/blog/

Day 21 – September 21 – Kris Driessen – All Kinds of Square (in a Square) – scrapdash.com

Day 22 – September 22 – Sarah Goer – Planned Improv Piecing – sarahgoerquilts.com

Day 23 – September 23 – Kathy Bruckman – Organizing kits for on-the-go sewing – kathyskwiltsandmore.blogspot.com

Day 24 – September 24 – Cheryl Daines Brown – The Secret to Flat Quilt Tops: Borders – quilterchic.com

Day 25 – September 25 – Cherry Guidry – Pre-assembling fusible applique – cherryblossomsquilting.com

Day 26 – September 26 – Laura Chaney – Getting started with English Paper Piecing – prairiesewnstudios.com

Day 27 – September 27 – Ebony Love – Cutting Bias Strips from a Rectangle – lovebugstudios.com

Day 28 – September 28 – Tammy Silvers – Working with heavier weight threads in your machine – tamarinis.typepad.com

Day 29 – September 29 – Kathy Nutley – Create a perfect facing or frame with 90 degree angles – quiltingsbykathy.com

Day 30 – September 3 – Joanne Harris – Using Leaders and Enders – quiltsbyjoanne.blogspot.com

The post Tutorial – Sewing Long Seams Without Stretching Them appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

This post is also part of the Colorblock Love QAL!

If you’re following the QAL, Week 1 is TWO posts… this one on how to choose your fabrics, and this one on How to Make Long Cuts are what you need to cut out the parts for your blocks!

The quilt is written for just 6 fabrics, but of course, you can make it more complex if you like. REMEMBER: this is YOUR quilt, so you get to make it YOUR way!

Your Colorblock LOVE pattern includes a link to the downloaded Addendum which gives you the fabric quantity info for making each section of this quilt from a different fabric – 21 fabrics total! The Addendum also has info for going rainbow style in solids from different fabric manufacturers, a foundation paper-pieced mini LOVE quilt, and info for merging the Kinship: Fusion 100 Block Sampler into the LOVE letters! Be sure to download it!

Color story ideas for Kinship + Love are all the way at the bottom of this post, so read on!

Regardless of how many fabrics you use (6 or 21, or anywhere in between) the quilt is going to look its best when you pay attention to VALUE. VALUE is how dark or light a fabric reads, regardless of its color. This is where being able to see your selections in grayscale will help immensely. If you don’t know how to snap a picture on your mobile phone and make it go monochrome, hop onto the interwebs and look up how to do it for your mobile device. You’re welcome! And if you don’t have a mobile phone that takes pictures, I recommend owning a Ruby Ruler – a nifty notion that allows you to see fabric values by merely looking through it. I’ll show you this later on in the post, but first, a quick discussion on how this quilt works best in color.

Let’s look at the pattern’s cover quilt:

In this quilt, I used a warm family of Kona Solids, ranging from a very dark purple through red and orange to yellow. In the pattern, the lightest is Fabric 1, and the darkest is Fabric 6. There are TWO major places to pay attention to:

1. Fabric 1, the lightest, should pop when placed next to Fabrics 5 and 6. Look at the yellow (Fabric 1) in each letter, and see how it shines next to the darks of 5 and 6, and specifically how it highlights the center of the V
2. Fabric 5 and 6 need to be apart enough in value that you can see the difference in them easily. Yes, they can be the same color family, but the difference between the super dark of the outer L and E (Fabric 6) and the medium dark of the outer O and the body of the V (Fabric 5) are what make the letter blocks distinct from each other.

Another way to get the letter blocks to be distinctly different is to choose VERY different fabrics for fabrics 5 and 6.

In this version, made from Ruby Star Society’s Darlings, Fabric 5 is dark pink and Fabric 6 is black. Note that Fabric 1 is not the lightest pink, but it has solid reading texture (instead of the horses in the lightest pink) and the pink is a bit HOT so it pops against Fabrics 5 and 6:

In this version, made from Maywood Studios’ Carnaby Street, Fabric 5 is orange, and Fabric 6 is navy. Note that Fabric 1 is the lightest in the group, and again, has a solid reading texture to hold the line sharp, especially next to Fabric 5 in the V:

In this version, made from Hoffman Fabrics’ Sparkle and Fade, Fabric 5 is black and Fabric 6 is red. The rest of the fabrics follow a classic gradation from darker gray to lightest gray/white, with Fabric 1 being the lightest:

And in this version, a digital rendition of Art Gallery Pure Elements solids, each letter uses a different color family. This makes keeping the contrast between the letters a little easier. Note that in each letter Fabric 1 still pops nicely – and in the O the values are reversed to make it work. O is usually dark on the edge, but dark yellow didn’t play well in the rainbow vibe so inverting the values worked well:

So as you can see, there are LOTS of ways to do this!

The simplest is to choose a color, and just do a value gradation from light to dark. Here’s a version of a simple gradation in purple, and next to it, the same photo in grayscale. There’s good contrast from light to dark, and you can see the difference between Fabrics 5 and 6 (the top two in the stack):

And in this stack the contrast could perhaps be a bit stronger (orange doesn’t lend itself to extremes of dark and light without heading into rust and peach – neither of which I wanted!) but the pattern texture is going to do the work of keeping Fabrics 5 and 6 apart:

If you don’t have an easy way to take a picture and turn it grayscale, I recommend using a Ruby Ruler, by Wise Craft Handmade:

You hold it over your fabrics and just look through it. The red filter takes out the color but leaves the value visible:

And a final idea for evaluating your fabrics… make a mini. The pattern addendum file includes a foundation paper pieced pattern to make a miniature quilt of just 9” x 11”. If you’re concerned that you might have a tricky fabric in your group, make the mini first to see how it behaves before committing to the big quilt! Note that the pattern scale of some fabrics might not translate well, but the colors and their values will give you good information.

In this version, I wasn’t sure I liked Fabric 4 (dark blue-violet with white triangles) but once I made the mini, I was confident that fabric was OK:

The last version I have to show you is one I made using Kinship: Fusion 100 Block Sampler blocks, designed by my friend Angie Wilson of GnomeAngel. During the Kinship sew along, Angie Wilson and discovered that her blocks fit into my quilt! So I made another version, specifically for this concept.

The color story worked like this… I chose 6 fabrics in a value gradation (the simplest version of Colorblock LOVE). Then, I chose 3 additional color variations for Fabric 5, and three more for Fabric 6:

I then made the Kinship blocks from the Fabric 5 and Fabric 6 variations. Once done, I substituted them for the letter sections in Colorblock LOVE (and all of this is in the Addendum!)

If you’ve been making the Kinship Blocks already, you don’t have to make new ones to merge the two quilts. Just lay them out, and find the fabrics that bring them together!

OK then! Go choose some fabric!

The post Colorblock LOVE Tutorial – How to choose your fabric appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.