After a fantastic day of break dancing and a little bit of Donkey Kong on the old Atari
2600 I got inspired to create a fantastic new quilt for all of you.
It’s a Pixel quilt and I’m ready to get started.
That’s right music fans.
You know me and you know how much I love my music.
And funny enough these pixel quilts or watercolor quilts or color wash quilts it’s all the
same style, all the same method.
But I love how we’re going back to some of the 80’s style artwork to make these
really fun and kind of modern quilts, right?
So now this quilt here is my double cassette boombox.
And what I’m going to teach you is going to show you exactly how to make this.
But this one is a little bit bigger to be working on quickly on the set today.
I have a portable version I’d like to share with you.
That’s right everyone, the old cassette player.
I believe it was called the Walkman.
At any rate we’re going to give you this fun printable right here.
We’ve got a pattern for the boombox.
But we also have printed out nice and small for you if you want to count out the squares
you can.
And that’s all it is.
It’s just a counting of the squares and laying out your stuff.
However there’s a really easy trick.
No we’re not going to sew all of those two inch squares together.
We’re going to fuse them first just like this.
Now my dear friends over at Quiltsmart have this fantastic interfacing.
And it is, it’s a super lightweight interfacing.
And I’m hoping you can tell there are grid marks on it.
And they come in different sizes.
We’re using the two inch squares here.
But the cool thing about a pixel quilt is you can do any different graphic design just
by changing it.
And another place that I saw a lot of cool inspiration was kind of looking for perler
bead designs is another great place to get inspired for making your own pixel quilt designs.
However let’s talk about this real quick.
The packaging comes in panel sizes.
And the panels may be spliced together one of two ways.
It’s such a lightweight interfacing that if I need to make a larger, because this is
over the back of everything.
I guess I forgot to tell you that, this is the back of everything.
I need a larger piece.
I can do one of two.
I can overlap one entire set of grids and then build out my design this way.
Or even better what I like to do is I will build my entire design on the two individual
pieces.
Because later on after everything is fused down we’re going to fold along these seam
lines and stitch.
So basically what I’m saying is we can build a half a quilt and another half of a quilt.
And then we would lay them with their right sides together, make that quarter of an inch
seam and it would join the two half quilts after they’ve been fused.
Maybe you’re not quite following along yet.
Maybe I should show you what we’re going to do and how we’re going to fuse it.
So I’m going to bring this over a little bit closer here.
And I’m using the Robert Kaufman solids.
I just love this bundle of fabric.
I picked it up so I could do a bunch of different quilts with it.
And you’re probably seeing that in some of the tutorials that have been coming out
lately.
And what I’ve done now is I’ve taken my printable and I’ve counted out my squares.
And you can see that I’ve drawn onto the fused side.
And the fused side there’s a little bit of a bumpy texture.
The other side is really nice and soft.
It actually feels almost like Kleenex.
So this rough side is the side that I want up.
And because it’s up I’m going to be able to go ahead and just count out my designs
and start to sharpie marker onto the grid line.
Now I want to make a big point out of that because some of our fabrics like the ones
I used in the background are white fabrics.
And every now with like a white or a pink or a pale yellow you might get some bleed
through.
Now we’re going to be folding along these grid lines.
So that will be in the seam allowance.
It will never be seen in the front of the quilt.
But I don’t want you to take the time to write on here any of your color names because
if you write your color names that wording may show through later on.
So just take the grid out like that.
And then you’re just going to go ahead and follow the pixel diagram to go ahead and start
laying your pieces where they go around the quilt.
So I’m going to start in the center where the cassette is.
And I wanted to point out, now this is a legitimate project, right?
Because the cassette here that you have will certainly fit in one of the two dub sides
on our boombox.
So you can make yourself your own dance and party mix for your quilting studio, right?
At any rate I’ve got my pre cut squares because it makes it so fast and easy to go
with my dark fabrics.
And so I’m just kind of like to go through and pick out the ones I need and I’m just
going to place them.
Now with our placement we don’t have to be super particular yet.
But I am going to take a little time and fuss once all of the pieces are in place.
And if you ever find that something is being a little precarious you certainly could use
like your clover mini iron and just touch the centers to hold a piece in place for some
reason if it was moving around but I sure found that everything bonded very nicely to
my quiltsmart.
So I’m going to go around and put all of my squares down first because I’m going
to need to press it all at once and I want to show you how to do that before we can go
over to the sewing machine.
So I tell you what, let me finish this up and I’ll be right back.
Welcome back, I’ve got my design all laid out.
And I didn’t quite point out but I left kind of my half squares up here just loose.
So I’ve finished all the way to the edge.
But there is glue up here so as I get ready to iron and glue down here hanging off the
edge of the board.
So as I get ready to iron what I really want to do is I want to go through and adjust any
squares.
And I’m using my little metal stiletto or a purple thang or a heck a toothpick would
probably work.
But I just want to make sure that there’s not big areas of glue showing through.
If there’s a little bit of overlap in a spot it won’t be a big deal.
But I’m just making sure that it looks as tidy as possible.
Then I’m going to come back into the center.
And I’m going to go ahead and like press, press.
And I’m going to start bonding down all of these layers here of my little two inch
squares or whatever size you’re using for your grid.
And once I get it fairly pressed down I am going to glide the iron over it one more time.
We want these pressed down pretty darn securely because we’re going to be folding along
each one of those printed grid lines that was there.
And running these through the sewing machine so that we don’t have to sew each little
two inch edge together.
That’s how it was originally done.
Now I’m going to give a little bit of steam in my iron to get it good and hot because
now you can see I’m kind of gliding over here just to make sure that everything is
secured.
And we’re almost ready for the sewing machine.
It doesn’t matter what kind of thread but I’m going to use cotton.
It doesn’t matter which color.
And what I like to think about if I want to find the long seams first.
This little unit I believe was an 11 by 12.
So basically I’d be folding the 12’s instead of the 11’s.
On the boombox I made all of the long seams first as I was going across because it secures
two sides of our squares so if pieces want to start to fall off because of just the size
that we have then we can kind of capture them.
Once we get all the verticals done we have those last rows and everything is secured.
Ok I’m ready for that machine.
I bet you are too.
Now I’ve got a quarter of an inch edge guide on the machine.
I’m going to fold this so it’s right sides together here and I like to do a little finger
crease.
And I can see already that that first square slipped away from me.
You probably caught me there.
No problem because I’m going to the machine right now.
If other ones are falling off we’re going to want to secure those.
And that’s simply because I rushed through the ironing but you would not be doing that.
I’m going to look at that gridline.
I’m going to lock in my stitches us here, capturing that one little loose square.
We’re going to sew all the way through the end.
Might as well use your thread cutter if you have one.
Now I’m just going to keep working from the machine.
I’m not going to start pressing these seams back open.
Oh my goodness.
I guess I better take a minute and hit this one more time with the heater because what
I’m going to show you is the next fold over.
And I was just going a bit too quick.
Now my steam is kicking in.
That’s going to be good.
That steam really helps on this interfacing.
I had the steam turned off on the iron in the first time.
So if you’re wondering what the heck is that guy doing today.
Simply just going a little too quickly.
One of my mantras recently has become thinking about the journey not just the destination.
So getting all of this set down properly is that journey not just the finished product
us all.
Now we’re going to come back and we’re going to fold what would be the 2nd and 3rd
seam lines together.
And this one is going to go pretty good.
But the next maybe two seam allowances I need to be careful that this first square doesn’t
start to curl underneath and start to tuck underneath.
I won’t explain how I found that one out.
And it wasn’t on this but it was years ago I did.
Oh no, now you know how I found it out anyway.
So another quarter inch seam.
We’re going to blow through this pretty quick.
And now you can see how great my squares are holding once I got that steam nice and hot
in there.
And as I said I’m literally just going to go through and I’m going to sew all of these
rows one after the next after the next after the next so that when it is all done it comes
back out of the magic of television.
And it’s getting a little shorter in one direction.
But what you can see here now I have all of these folds done.
Now there’s a couple of different ways to address this.
I’m going to teach you the proper way, industry standard, which is going to go ahead and create
a snip at each fold like yay so I can fan them backwards.
So I have one layer to still do.
And what I found was that if I could get an ironing surface that I could then just kind
of put over the edge, then you could see how that folds.
Or I used the edge of my table at home.
And then I could just go through and I could just snip, snip, snip.
And you can use scissors or snipers.
You want to make sure you get all the way through.
And here’s the cool thing.
You could actually cut through those threads that you did already.
Not too far but we’re going to go ahead and sew this direction.
So even if you hit the threads it’s actually be better than being short.
So I’ve got to get all of these cut through.
And of course I’m using a pretty small pair of scissors.
But all of the rest I did at home for us.
So now we’re ready to go back on over to the sewing machine and we’re going to sew
the other direction.
So now here I”m going back to what would be right sides together, correct?
And what I really want to point out is I’m going to take the time to make sure each seam
is folded or fanned in opposite directions.
So as I approach the machine right now I have my little stiletto handy because that’s
also going to help.
And I’m pushing the upper seam up and the bottom seam down.
It makes it easy to see.
But the next row that’s going to be opposite because that seam is already going to be set
in the down position.
So let me see if I can do this a little slow so you can understand.
Ok.
This seam is coming down, this seam is going up.
And I like to have my little stiletto handy so I can just lift under and keep it real
flat.
And what that’s doing for us is it’s keeping the bulk management in our favor so when we
machine quilt we don’t have to avoid those corners.
That’s basically the reason.
So you can see this pace is much more precise.
And that’s why the quilt on the back wall behind me looks so terrific because all the
squares are kind of stitched this way instead of individually.
Ok, almost done for us.
Go all the way to the end please.
Now with that being said let’s point out what I was trying to say here, now these seam
allowances here have started to criss cross or fan open.
When I go to do the next row I’m going to pinch it and fold it.
But this part here has already been pressed up.
So then it’s still going to press up so then the next one is going to press down.
So I’m going to come back over here and I’m just making sure that I get off to a
good start on the first one because I let my eye look up to the seam I just created
to make sure that the next one is going correctly.
So that’s now going up.
That’s going down.
And that’s all you’re going to have to do to get your pixel quilt all stitched together
onto the interfacing.
So let’s finish this out and I’ll talk you through the rest of it.
And you can probably see how much better the seams start to go once the other side had
been created.
It started to fold over for you.
So as a reminder you’re going to do now all of the rest of the other direction.
And you’re going to leave the interfacing in.
There’s absolutely no way to remove it let alone reason to.
It adds a little bit of a body to our quilt.
And then if you will follow me back over here to the quilt sample itself, right?
And like I said I did do stitch in the ditch.
But I didn’t do every single row.
And I used some white thread hoping it would pretty much hide.
And for the most part it really did.
So basically I counted across from the center over and basically did every other row down
and then every other row across it.
Then stitching here, not here, then here again.
And that holds it together but it doesn’t make it too compact.
So it still has some nice loft to it.
But of course this would be a fantastic place to go back in and free motion machine quilt.
I think I probably better do some play and some pause buttons which I know you all use
so that you can stop, watch what we’ve done and follow along in your own home studios
so that you can enjoy all these great projects right here at Man Sewing.
Thanks for being a Man Sewing fan.
It’s great to have you out there encouraging me to create fantastic new content.
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