3D Quilting Session 3: Shaded Squares Quilt Pattern

So now we have our second obstacle illusion, 3D quilt top. And this one is shaded squares. And what we've done is we have a lighter color square with a darker color square looking like it's sitting behind it, making the light color sort of pop off the surface of the quilt a little bit. And so, obviously you can see we make this in any size you want. We're gonna make the larger size, this one here, here in just a little bit. But I wanna talk a little bit about picking your colors and picking your fabrics for making this quilt block. So, obviously I've chosen white as my background color, and I did that because I really wanted whatever color I picked for my squares to stand out. You can pick any sort of neutral you want, or you could even go the exact opposite. You could have a really dark color in the back and it might make it look like your squares are in the background and you have a dark color surrounding it. But what I wanted was to have these colors be different shades, but still be essentially the same color. And so I did that by choosing an ombre fabric. And so you can see here is, this is one fabric, but just on one piece, we have a really, really light in going all the way up to a really, really darken. So I was able to cut out squares from the light side and the dark side, and only had three by ombre fabric. So this is a fun way to be able to get the different shades that you need for this specific quilt top, just buying one fabric. And you can see on our finished one here, that some of the light colors that I cut out, like this one here, I have the really light, but then behind it, I have sort of the medium color in the ombre. But if I go just up here, again I have really light but then I have the really dark behind it. So again, I'm able to have a lot of different shades all the same color, all within our same quilt top, and I only had to buy a one little bit of fabric. So if you can find an ombre fabric in a color that you like, that's what I would suggest for this quilt. Let me set my fabric aside, we're gonna talk about the actual design of this block. My ombre fabric is a little easier to see. And again, this is sort of how the block is going to look once it's assembled. And depending on how you lay it out, to see we have small blocks and we have our larger squares here. And so what you wanna decide is whether you want the light color on top and the dark color in back or vice versa, and then you can just print out your template and you can just mark right on it. So on mine that I made here, this was my light color. I had whites in sort of our background. And then this section over here was my dark block. Now I could, if I wanted to cut out two squares and maybe layer them, but then I'd have to do some sort of applicate to get the squares down, and I didn't want that, I want it to be able to piece this all as one unit. So to do that, I had to split this block into two pieces. So this, if you picture it going underneath this square, this whole square block right here is one piece. So they're both the dark color. So, printing this out and having this handy and next to you when you're putting your things together even when you're just thinking about cutting out ombre fabric, we're really help you see what colors need to go where. For this one, we're making the large squares. So, I will have my little drawing off to the side. That's gonna help remind me of how I need to have things laid out. So I have a large light color square, these are four and a half inch squares, and they have that in sort of the upper left. I need three small squares, these are two and a half inch squares, and I have my white ones upper right and lower left. And now I need to make sort of the three quarters of the dark colored square. To do that, we have our long rectangle that's two and a half by four and a half, and we have our other little square. And so what's important to see with this especially when you use an ombre fabric, is that you can sort of see how this piece is going from darker to just slightly lighter. Same thing over here, you have darker into slightly lighter, and you can see these were cut from the same strip, that's why we have dark on one side and light on the other. Now, what you want to think about when you're laying it out is that you have the dark sides or the light side is just the same color sides of these pieces together. Because you're trying to make this look like it's one block that just has a light color laid on top of it. So if you had this one flipped around, you can see how those two colors don't match and it's not gonna give you the same look as a finished square. So if you are using the ombre fabric, make sure that you have the same shade of that color together when you're putting everything laying it out. So that way you have, you can achieve the look that you want. So, this is how everything needs to go together. And if you're familiar with just piecing any sort of quilt pattern or blocks or anything together, you can see that we need to put this section together first, this section, and then put these two pieces together. And that's exactly what we're gonna do. So I like to start with my small squares. And I'm gonna keep everything laid out like this as I pick things up, pin them and move them over to my machine. Because if I just say, pick these up and I'm gonna go stitch them, why am I accidentally get this one rotated, and then I've stitched the dark side to my white. And I wanna make sure, again that I have these two matched up. So I know I need to stitch the white to my light side. And in most cases, because this is such a small piece, again it's a two and a half inch square, and if you're making the smaller version, it's an even smaller square. I wouldn't pin those, because they're sort of just gripped together and I wouldn't need to. However, I don't wanna forget what side it is, I'm supposed to be stitching. So I'm gonna put a pin there. So I know I'm stitching right down this side. So I'm gonna take this over to my machine. Let's slide that in a little bit. And we're just gonna stitch. Just like you would if you're piecing any other quilts, we have our quarter inch seam allowance, using my quarter inch foot, not worried about back stitching at the beginning or end. I'm just going to stich. Right like that, and I can take it out. And now as I've mentioned even when we were assembling our first tumbling block one, that I like to press as I go, but I'm gonna make a slight exception to the rule, and then I'm gonna lay this one out, and I'm gonna go ahead and stitch this one next, and then I can press both of these together. So again, leaving it laid out how I want it, and then bringing this down right here. Now on this one, it's a little bit easier to see which side you're gonna stitch, you're not gonna accidentally stitch over here because they're different sizes. But if you want to just sort of get in that habit of putting pin sort of remind yourself, you can do that. And then we're ready to stitch here. Okay, straight along that edge. Okay, and now we're going to press these, because we want to make sure that everything is laying nice and flat before we attach them to our larger square and then put the whole thing together. So even as I'm pressing, I'm just sort of keeping things laid out how I had them before. Get this to turn back on. And with a light color and a dark color, I like to always press towards the dark color, that way I'm not worried about seeing that seam really show through the lighter color from the right side. I always like to press from the back, and then give it one more little press the front, make sure everything is nice and flat. Do the same thing here, set the seam if you want. And again, I'm pressing towards that darker color. One more little press from the front. Okay, and now I'm ready to put this together a little bit more. Again, I can put this back how it goes, and you can see how this is starting to come together. Now, I have to stitch the light color to these two first before I can attach it to this side. And that's because obviously when I stitched these together, I am taking out that seam allowance and then making them the same size. So I can fold this down, lie like so, and this one is a little bit bigger and I do like to use pins. I just like to make sure everything is staying nice and lined up. So I'm going to put the pin in each side. Way no nothing's moving or shifting while I'm stitching. Especially, if you're just starting out to quilting or maybe you have more of a sewing background than a piecing or quilting background, definitely handy to use pins, make sure everything stays right where you want it. Okay, again I'm gonna press this. Now, this case, this is my dark color. And I always stay on pressing towards the darker color, but this dark color is attached to this white. So, I'm gonna go ahead and press these up towards this one, because this is darker than the white. And as you see, even when I just flip it over, that sort of the way those seams want to go, because I have a double layer of seam there. So, I don't like to fight the seams or try to impress them in a direction they don't naturally wanna lay, because then I find there's just more book to your quilts as you're working your way through it. So now we have our last section to put on, and you can see that now that those are all stitched together, this is the right size, they're the same size now. So, if you had everything laid out and you're thinking, oh no, this one is too short, stitch these together first and then everything should line up perfectly. So you can go ahead and put this one right on here. Okay, and I'm going to put a couple pins in and make sure everything lined up. I ain't even put one in the middle, more down here, and then we'll go ahead and stitch this one. We'll pretty much be done with our little block. Now your seams should be nice and pressed, but just make sure they're laying the direction you want them to lay as you stitch over them. You have one behind here that if you want to, feel with your finger under there to make sure that it's laying nice and flat before you switch over it, do that way. Don't take it off your machine and find that you've switched the seam allowance in the opposite way you've pressed it because that wouldn't really be good. Okay, now I can open this up and we have our completed block. Now, this is gonna be the exception to our pressing rule. Again, I like to just go in the direction that the seam wants to lay. But in this case we have two that wanna go opposite. So I am going to, again, go away from my white. I don't really want any of these seams to be shown through on those little white squares. Just because it is such a light color fabric, and maybe it's just that it's not a very thick white and that you would really easily be able to see through it. But I just wanna make sure that everything looks nice and neat from the right side. And if you were to hold it up, you're not might be able to see those seams allowances through there. And I don't want that. So I press away from the white. So this is our finished block. So you can see we have our light square, our dark square hidden behind it, and then we have our background squares. And now you can make, again a bunch of different sizes of these, like I did and put them all together and then start stacking them out. But as I was doing that, what I was finding is that, all of my squares, if I just made two of these blocks, stack them next to each other, all the squares sort of blended together. And I wasn't really seeing just definite squares like we wanna do. So, you can go ahead and take and just cut strips of fabric, and you can saw really thin strips, you can saw really thick strips to something to make this block stand apart from the next one you attached to it. So if we go back to our larger one that we made, you can see on this square, which is what we just assembled, I have really thin strips that went all the way around. But on the much smaller squares, I had to make bigger ones. So these two ended up the same size. If you want to have bigger squares, smaller strips or vice versa, you can do that when creating this. And so that's all there is to this one. It's really easy to just make squares look three-dimensional by changing up the colors. Again, we'll go back to our drawn out design, 'cause this is what it's all gonna start from, and this is where you first decide how you want your block to look. So before you even go and pick out colors or before you even start cutting anything out, print this out and just write on there, so you know where you want the light and dark and what you need to have before you start cutting things out. And once you do that, you'll be ensured that your final product will turn out like you want it to. So, I really hope you give this one a try, it's really easy to put together, and it's just a fun little optical illusion 3D quilts. So give it a try.