Fat Quarters Session 4: A Block that Works for Both

While half square triangles were a great block to make with our fat quarters, and making the addition or plus sign quilt idea is a really fun one to use with fat eighths, nine patches work well with both. Now a really fun thing that you can do with nine patches is make them from strips of fabric so they come together much quicker. So this can easily be done with either a fat quarter or a fat eighth. Here's an example of the size of nine patch you're going to get from the strips that we cut from our fat eighth. So again, when are talking about our fat eighth and our fat quarter fabrics we want to talk about the amount of usable fabric you have given your design. This one is printed fairly straight on this fabric. Unlike a previous one where I had to do a lot of trimming, it's fairly straight, so I could probably cut this directly into thirds and get wider strips. However, if you want to be on the safe side and know that you have enough fabric for both this print and whatever other print you're going to use to combine with this to make your nine patch, I would recommend using two-and-a-half-inch strips. This is for a fat eighth. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this fat eighth here and I'm going to cut it apart into two and a half inch strips. So I want to make sure I'm nice and straight along the edge to make any adjustments you need to. And then just go ahead and cut and move the machine just a little bit so I can get in here. Your longer strips of fabric you've got to have a little bit more space to work with. Got off just slightly. Oops, go ahead and bring that, line it back up, and go ahead and continue cutting. All right so there's one strip. So you should be able to get three two and a half inch strips from your fat eighth of fabric. So again, I want to line it up, hold it in place. Go ahead and cut. There's two. Set this one aside. We can go ahead and get one more. So depending on your fabric, and whether or not you had to do a lot of squaring up before you started, depends on how much waste or excess fabric you're going to have when you get to the end of cutting. So here's our last two and a half inch strip. So you can see, I have about an inch strip left that I can maybe save and use for an additional project if I wanted. Or save as a scrap pile and used for something. But that is a good size strip to cut to make sure that you're getting the most amount from no matter what print you're using. So you want to cut two and a half inch strips from two different or coordinating fat quarters. We're then going to sew these, I'm sorry, fat eighths. We're then going to sew these back together but in two different variations. One of them needs one of the fabrics on the outside. So I'm going to go with this zigzag print. We have our floral and our zigzag and the other one needs to be exactly the opposite. So we'll put our floral on the outside, our zigzag in the middle, and then our floral on the outside. Now we need to stitch these together. I'm gonna set one parasite first, because what I want to do is I want to put them with the selvage edges all at the same edge. And the reason I'm doing this is because I squared up a straight edge, cut my two and a half inch strips, but didn't necessarily square up the length. So they may not be the exact same length. So I'm not worried about lining up my edges, putting pins in and making sure everything is perfect. I just want to make sure that all of my selvages are on the same edge. That way, if I'm cutting off say a half inch or an inch on one end, I'm only doing that on one end because that's where all the selvages are as opposed to losing a little bit on both ends and not getting quite as much as I want. So I'm go ahead and take these, put them right sides together, and I can take this over to my machine and sew. Bring my machine back in a little bit. I moved it out of the way since I had my ruler in the way. And I want to go ahead and stitch this using a quarter inch seam allowance. I'm not using any pins because they're fairly thin strips so it's easy to hold them together. I can also stop and make any minor adjustments that I need to along the way as I go down my strip. And I'm just going to sew all the way down and right off the edge. Now you will be making two of these strip sets from each two fat eights that you cut apart. So you can sort of a chain piecing method. So I've done two from my first set. I'm going to go ahead and grab two of them from my second set and stitch these together before I even clip my threads. Again, I'm going to readjust so I have all of my selvage edges at the same edge. Go ahead and bring these up, align our edges and stitch. So again, I've just stitched right off of one and I'm going to stitch right onto the next one. And just continue with my stitching. Even though there's not a hundred pieces that we're doing or a big number of pieces, chain piecing like this still does save a little bit of time. It also saves a little bit of thread each time you do it because you're not pulling your thread out to make your cuts. Especially if your machine doesn't have an automatic thread cutter or a feature like that. The one thing you want to make sure is when you chain piece, if you have a certain section that goes with a certain remaining piece, you want to make sure you put them back with the right pair. So I've come to the end of this one here, I can go ahead and trim my threads here. I'm going to then cut apart my two sections like so, and now I need to put them back with their respective pair. So I just need one of them to make sure that they have the zigzag on the outside. And one of them has to have the floral on the outside. And while this may look like it's the correct pair, I wanted my selvages all on the same sides, which means I need to swap these two here, and bring my floral down here. So it is on the top and bottom. All my selvage judges are on the same end and then same thing with up here. So I'm gonna do my last rows of stitching. Go ahead and line up these edges. Go ahead and take them over and stitch. Something like a nine patch like this where we're putting strips together that are in wide enough strips like this two and a half inch strip. You don't have to worry about doing any pressing until you actually get your entire nine patch done. So my thread got caught just a little bit. I have a little frayed edge from my fabric. It got cut down underneath there. Don't want that to get stuck, so I just trim that away. Go ahead and overlap a couple stitches from where I ended, to where I began. Secure that and then just continue on. Sometimes when you get those stitches caught, you can just leave them, but your fabric might curl up a little bit as you stitch, but it's just easier if you see them right away to go ahead and trim them off. So again, I have my ends lined up. I'm going to make sure they stay lined up as I go. And then just stitch right off the edge. I'm gonna go ahead and leave that one on there. I'm not going to trim any of my threads yet, and I can bring over my other strip set. Again, line up these edges. And now I can stitch right off of the previous one and onto the next one. If you're finding you're having trouble getting this one started, it's not going underneath there, go ahead and just lift up your presser foot and put the fabric right underneath. You're still going to have that little bit of thread chain between, so there'll be plenty of room to separate your little sections, but you just want to make sure you get that started nicely and your fabric doesn't curl under. Making sure those edges stay lined up. Right, like so. And just stitch right off the edge of this one. So now that we have our two strip set sections stitched from our two fat eights that have been trimmed into two and a half inch strips, now we can do a little bit of pressing. So I'm going to bring my iron over, and we are going to press these. Now, normally when you're pressing your strips, you're going to be pressing towards the darker of the two fabrics. With this particular collection, there isn't necessarily a darker fabric, but you need to just pick one to be your darker fabric because you want to make sure you're pressing in opposite directions so we can nest those seams when we put our nine patch together. So I'm going to pick this floral print on the outside to be my darker fabric. So first thing I like to do is set all of my seams first. So that just means while your fabric is laying right sides together how you stitched it, go ahead and give it a press right on those seams. Go ahead and do both sides, like so. Just right along the edge. This helps make sure that the threads are really set down into the fibers of the fabric. I also find that it's easier to get a nice crisp fold if you set your seam in first before you try to press it over. Once you've done that, I'm gonna go ahead and fold this over, finger press it first to get it laying flat, on both sides, then I can bring in with my iron and give it a nice hard press like this. You can then move on all the way up your strip. I like to finger press first that way I make sure that my seam allowance is going the direction I want to underneath. You can also press from the wrong side first and then flip it back over and give it a final press from the right side. On more complicated blocks or ones that have quite a few more pieces where you really want to make sure you have all those seam allowances laying in a certain direction, I might do that, but with a strip like this where there's just a few pieces, doing it from the right side is easy enough. So there's one strip set, go ahead and set this aside for now. You need to bring in our second one and do the exact same pressing. So again, we're going to set that seam, all along, like so, on one side. Go ahead and do the same thing on the other side. And now since we chose our floral fabric to be our dark fabric, again we want to make sure we're pressing towards that. So we can, we need to just fold that seam allowance under towards that darker fabric. So you can do that with your fingers first make sure it's laying flat like you want it to and come right along that edge. I think that one of the number one steps in making sure that things turn out the way you want them to, they're nice and crisp, your seam allowances lineup, things turn out the size that you want them to, obviously your first one is to accurately cut but then pressing is the number two most important thing that you can do while you are assembling your quilt pieces. Got my seam allowance folded under on this side, go ahead and give this a press. I do a little shimmy with my iron that makes sure that I am coming right along the edge of that seam that I don't have extra fabric folded under. And then I can give it a press. So I know it looks like I'm ironing, but I'm really just lightly moving the iron on top of the fabric until I know for sure it is laying where I want it to. And then I give it some pressure and actually press that fabric. Once you have both of your strip sets sewn, you have them pressed, we're going to cut them apart again, but we're going to do this in a different way. So it actually gives us our nine patch. So we made this using two and a half inch strips going the way I have it here. This way here. Now, what we need to do is cut two and a half inch strips going the opposite direction that's essentially going to give us the squares that will become our nine patch. First thing that we need to do is square up one of these edges. It doesn't really matter which edge you start on, whether it's your selvage edge or your opposite edge. You just want to make sure that it's a nice, straight edge. So one way that you can do this is obviously by lining up your edges along a straight edge of your cutting mat, and just trimming off the very edge. I like to get as many as I possibly can. So I like to utilize as much of the fabric as I can and only trim off a small, small amount. So I'm gonna trim off just this tiny little bit here, and now I have a perfect straight edge. From here, I'm going to cut my two and a half inch strips from my strip set. So I have my two and a half inch line, I can line that up right along the bottom of my strip set. Go ahead and hold my ruler in place. And I'm going to cut. And I'm going to continue doing this all the way along this strip. Line up my two and a half inch line. Right, like so. Then give it a cut. So I should be getting quite a few of my strip sets cut apart into my sections. And obviously the longer your strip is that you start with the more that you're going to get. Again, we talked about a lot about usable fabric area. So you may be limited by maybe one print that you had to square up more than another, but just get as many as you can out of your lengths that you cut from your fat eighths. Obviously you can do this exact same method using fat quarters and just make larger squares, but you're still going to end up with essentially the same length. So you can get a few more here. From this one. And even your two different strip sets that you made, you may not be able to get the same number from each of them, depending on if you had to square up one of those fabrics more than another. Here's my last one that I can cut. And you can see I have very little waste right here of actual usable fabric. The rest is just that selvage edge. You have another strip set that you need to do the same kind of cutting to. We need to first start by giving ourselves a straight edge to begin with. So I'm lining up the edges of my strip set with my mat. Then I can take and cut off the smallest amount that I can, making sure that I have a straight line going right across the bottom. Right, like so. And now I want to, again, cut some two and a half inch strips. I'll cut just a couple from this one so you can see how our nine patch is going to come together. Here's one. Here's another. Like so. And so on, and so on until you get all the way down your strip. Now you need to arrange your two sets that you got from your strip sets. So you should have two piles. One that has one fabric on the outside, one that has the other fabric on the outside. And what you're going to do is arrange them in piles. So you need to alternate them, so you have one fabric on the outside, then the other one on the outside, then the other one on the outside. And then if you were doing the opposite of that, you would end up with one that looks like this. So you want to make sure that your fabrics from your strip sets are in alternating spots in your sets like this. And then you need to put these together. So when you are putting together a nine patch your seams allowances should nest nicely. And that's because of the way that we pressed our fabric. So by nesting means you're going to take and place your fabric right sides together. And on your edge that you're going to be stitching, you have one seam allowance going in one direction, one seam allowance going in the other, and those should fit together perfectly. So you can shift them with your fingers a little bit, to make sure that they are lined up right next to each other, that there's no gap. And then put a pin to hold one of those in place. Come over to the other one, make sure those are nested and held in place also. Like so, put a pin. And then depending on the size of square, you can put a pin in either end. This is a fairly small square, so you may not need to, but if you prefer to pin, you can do that. And then if you're making a bunch of these nine patches from your strip sets you made from your fat eights or your fat quarters, you can do the same strip piecing that we did previously where we had stitched right off the edge of one onto another, which definitely saves some time and some thread when you're working through these. You're just going to stitch these together, removing those pins right when you get to them. Don't remove them too far in advanced, especially those ones that are holding your nested seams together because you don't want anything to shift on you as you are getting ready to stitch over those seams. We'll attach our last one down here to the bottom. Again, we're going to nest these seams, like so. Put a pin. Nest them and put a pin. Now, when you're putting your pins in to hold your nested seams, it's up to you as to what side you put your pin on. I like to put my pin on the opposite side of where I'm stitching from, that way I can stitch all the way up to onto that seam allowance right onto the seam line before I then have to remove that pin, that way I have my pin holding it in place up until the last possible minute before I have to remove it. If I had put it on the other side, I'm taking it out fairly soon. And then you have the risk of that seam shifting just a little bit before you stitch over it. So that's where I like to place my pins. Just go ahead and stitch off the edge and clip your threads. So you would continue with this method of creating all of your nine patches. Right, like so. And you're going to get quite a few of these nine patches from your strips that you cut from your fat eights or your fat quarters. You'd obviously give this a press, go ahead and set those seams and press it once you are done. But here is the nine patches made from two of the fat eighths from that same collection. So you can see how you're going to get ones that have the lighter color on the outside and ones that have darker color on the outside. Now, given that your strips may be different lengths, and you may not get the same amount from each one, you may not get as many as I have gotten here. This is the most that you can get out of a fat eighth, two fat eights together cut into two and a half inch strips. And you will have one of these leftovers. So just know that that if you have one leftover it wasn't cause you made a mistake. But so this is a good block that works well for both fat quarters or fat eights really easy to make using strips, it makes it go much faster, and you can make them in varying sizes. And while nine patches are really fun to make, really easy to make, and you can put them together in a bunch of different combinations to make even more complicated looks, if you want this checkerboard look, you can add them with other blocks, but there are also fun things that you can do with nine patches that make them not even look like a nine patch anymore. And that's called a disappearing nine patch. So disappearing nine patches, if you've never done them before is where you take a nine patch, you cut it apart and then you sew it back together to make it look like something else. If you've never done them before, I recommend starting with a larger size of nine patch, as the more you cut them apart and sew them back together, the smaller they get. So I have some sample nine patches here, that were cut using much larger fabrics. These are actually ones that are made using fat quarters as opposed to fat eighths. Still did the same exact method, cut them into strips, sewed my strips together in alternating colorways, cut them apart and assembled my nine patch. So the first way that you can make a disappearing nine patch is we're going to take, and we're going to cut it apart in half, right along our vertical line, and we're going to cut it in half right along our horizontal line. So I've got mine lined up here. I'm going to take and measure this over. There is a downloadable that shows you where to cut your nine patch apart because it can be a little bit intimidating to cut apart a nine patch that you've just put together and make sure that you're doing it correctly. So this shows you where your cutting lines should be. This should be along the center of your three down the middle of this way and the center of your three in this direction. So for me, I'm going to measure over, mine's two and a half inches from this seam line. So that's right along the middle here. I'm gonna go ahead and cut. Make sure your ruler doesn't move before you cut it. Now, before you move it, don't pick it up or move your pieces at all, you want to make sure they're still laying nice and flat on your cutting mat. So carefully pick up your ruler to rotate it. We're going to cut it again down the center, this time, horizontally. So for me, mine is two and a half inches away from my seam. Right, like so. And now my nine patch has essentially become a four patch. So if I can spread apart my pieces just a little bit, you can see, I now have four pieces to work with. Now, you get to rearrange them and put them back together. So there are multiple different ways that you can rearrange your nine patch. One of which is to turn alternating corners, rotate them like so, and then you get a block that looks like this. Another way you can rotate them just slightly so you have them like this. You can play around with your nine patch so that you can put it together in a variety, put it back together in a variety of different ways like this. So you can take your one block, cut it apart and make it into something that no longer looks like a nine patch. So again this was the cutting diagram that shows where to cut it. You can rearrange it however you want, and then will show it back together. I have rearranged one way and sewn back together this was the first arrangement that I showed you where I just rotated these two and turn them, sorry rotated these two, turned them. And you have a fun little pattern that goes right across the center. Now, obviously when you have this nine patch, it's fairly large to start out with. The more you cut it apart and then sew it back together, it's going to get smaller. So just know that if you are planning out a quilt that your block may not be the same size once you sew it back together. So that's one way that you can cut out or cut apart your nine patch to turn it into a disappearing nine patch. There is one more additional way. So I'll bring in, this is another, just simple nine patch that I've made from the same fabrics, only in a reverse configuration. So I have the darker ones out in the four corners. And again, there's a downloadable that it comes with this one that tells you where to cut as well. So it's the same first initial cuts where we're going to go down the center, vertically as well as horizontally. And then we are going to make cuts from point to point all the way around. So these dotted lines are our cut lines. So I'm going to start with my vertical and horizontal cutting. So again, for me with my size of nine patch that I'm using, two and a half inches from my same line right here. Again, I'm not moving my nine patch, being careful to pick \up my ruler and move it. And be careful when you set it down, but if you do move it, just make sure everything is lined back up. Two and a half inches from this seam line here. And go ahead and give another cut here right, like so. And now I'm going to cut this apart even further. This is where I'm not going to do my diagonal cuts. So again, make sure everything stays lined up. Move this over here. Go ahead and cut diagonally cross one block here. Go ahead and move my ruler over and I cut diagonally across this next block here. And do the same thing on the remaining two blocks. Now I'm going very slow with this because I want to make sure I don't move any of my pieces. And it can be a little bit hard if you are always standing in the same spot when you're cutting. A lot of times, if you're in your home cutting studio, maybe you cut your fabric at the kitchen table or in your office, or wherever you're doing a lot of your sewing. If you have the ability to walk around your cutting table, or adjust your cutting mat, rotate it in any way, you can do that as well to make sure that you are moving as opposed to your fabric moving or rearranging in any way. All right, we have all of our pieces cut apart, and now you would get the fun part of rearranging them again. So if there's any areas where you were going over a little bulk of the seam allowance that didn't get cut, make sure you cut that apart all the way. I'll just separate them out slightly. And now you're going to swap corners to make different blocks. So what I'm going to do is make a block like this that now has a small squares going across the middle. And now I can swap this one here and now I have these small squares in the corners. Same thing. I'm gonna swap this one. So I have my small squares in the middle. Swap this one, I have my small squares on the outside edge. So here's one way that you can arrange this. You can, as with many of the other configurations, how we cut them apart, arrange them in many different ways. And then, sew them back together. You can also arrange your four patches differently once you get them. So I can rotate this block here, so now my little squares are going from corner to corner and I have almost what looks like little hearts right here in the middle. And you would just sew these back together into your four patches first. And then, sew your two squares at the top together, your two squares at the bottom together, and sew those two rows together. So I'll bring in one that is this layout right here, push it aside. And this is what it looks like when it's also together. So we have fun little hearts. You can even rearrange it so you have these squares down in the middle. It's any way that you want to put it back together to create an entirely different look, it's totally up to you. So there are many, many fun boxes you can do with fat quarters and with fat eights that work either specifically for fat quarters well or work with that eighths well, but in nine patch and then turning it into a disappearing nine patch and creating so many fun, different, one of the kind blocks like this is something that you can do with both fat quarters and fat eighths, so I hope you give it a try.