If you love magic tricks, you’re going to love today’s tutorial because it’s all
an illusion, here on Man Sewing.
That is right I have stolen this pattern idea, well that’s not true, I actually purchased
the pattern from the MSQC. It’s called It’s All an Illusion. And I’ve seen lots of these
quilts done lots of different ways and I just love the way that you can make a simple block
and a shadow effect and then lay in your background colors so easy here. And I am using a ten
inch pre-cut. This one is from Wilmington. It’s called Sunny Sides up. And what I found
is if you divide this up you basically get about ten fabrics that are going to be yellows.
And about ten fabrics that are going to be orange. So I did have to push this one to
my yellow family so that it would be ten and ten. Forty pieces in your pre-cuts so you
have two of each. Oh, mouthful, that’s ok. We’ve got a couple of little organizing
steps to still do. So first step was divide oranges from yellows. We’re going to focus
on the yellows now. We’re going to set those oranges aside for a moment. And with these
we’re just going to simply sub-cut these into five inch by ten inch squares. Now on
this quilt, accuracy is going to help so we want to go a little slower than I normally
do. And we want to take it and just stack these up so they look pretty good. I’m not
going to do more than about four or five in a stack because I want to keep my ten inch
by five inch as perfect as possible. So I’ll work through something like this. And you’re
going to then take your ruler, find your five inch mark. So I’m looking across here making
sure I’m lined up. And you’re going to take and slice these bad boys down and you’re
going to do that for the entire stack of yellows as you work through, ok? Real easy. So what
that yields is four of each print now. So you’re going to have those, those. So you
can see you’ve got four of them, right? Now let’s move into the oranges real quick
and I’m going to need a couple of these yellows here in a moment as I go.
Ok, now let’s do the oranges. And we’re going to do one more step for organizing.
So you’re going to take your fabrics and you’re going to divide it into two equal
piles. So you use the same print in each pile, right? We’re just going to work our ways
through here. And early on I took my entire pre-cut apart and actually made it so I had
my gradient of my yellows from lightest to darkest. And the gradient of the oranges from
lightest to darkest. And some of these are pretty darn close in value so just do your
best. But one of the things I am doing in the project is, check this out at the quilt,
we are basically going to make four blocks that are all of the same. So you’re going
to have always your brightest, or I should say your deepest yellow with your deepest
orange. And then down in here you’re going to see we’re going to have like our lightest
yellow with our lightest orange. And if you look real close one, two, three, and four
again we’re making the same block four times. We’re using the same fabrics four times
over, ok? So as we get through here, one of these stacks, and I’m almost done, is going
to be sub-cut. The other stack we’re going to set aside for those borders you see going
around the quilt behind me. And I’m going to only sub-cut these in basically about stacks
of two at a time. So we’re going to do a little bit more tidying up as we go. Ok, so
as I said this stack we’re going to set aside for borders later. And this stack, so
you have now one of each of your oranges, we’re going to sub-cut into one and a half
inch strips. So let’s do that for you.
Now, I’m looking at the edge of the fabric along the edge of my ruler. And I’m going
to make what will end up being six 1 ½ inch strips. You’re also going to end up with
a little one inch strip left over at the end and you can use that for something. I just
haven’t figured out what that something is quite yet so we’ll just organize that
over there. And what we’re really focused on is our six 1 ½ inch wide strips. Now the
real sub-cut is I need four strips that are five inches by 1 ½ so this was ten. And if
I divide that right in half it’s going to be five. Nice and slow, nice and accurate,
ok? So those two strips just made four of my five inch squares that I’m going to need.
These 1 ½ inch strips are going to be sub-cut down to nine inches long. And for that because
they were ten inches we can just organize them. And then cut one inch off one of the
ends here. Ok, just like that. Now we have a printable in the description below the video
that shows all of these numbers and the way we can construct it so you don’t have to
be struggling to write all of that down. We’ve got it all prepared for you already. But just
as a reminder, fives by 1 ½, nines by 1 ½. And our original yellow blocks that we had
are five by 10. So we’re going to need all of that in a second. And the last thing we
need to do is prepare all of our gray strips. All of that background fabric we are using.
So those, you start with strips that are the width of our fabric so we’re going to call
that 44 today. And they’re also 1 ½ inches so that 1 ½ inches is used over and over
and over again. When these get sub-cut down we’re going to make a series of piles. We
need 1 ½ by 1 ½ squares. And you need two of those for every block. So you’ll need
eighty of those if you’re making that size square. Nice square there because you have
40 blocks at the end. These little guys here are seven by 1 ½ and these long guys here
are eleven by 1 ½ . And those all came out of the strips. And the cool thing is if you
are using that Missouri Star pattern they’ve got a whole table and breakdown that shows
you how many strips of each if you’re just in assembly line mode, ok? Once you get your
backgrounds made it’s time to go ahead and start pre-building the block.
And let me show you what the block is going to look like. There’s our block there. So
that’s that yellow background, right? We’re going to build two and the next step really
is then with each of our, whether they’re short or long, background or shadow color,
I should call those, one of the squares on each end like this. All of this is done with
a quarter inch seam allowance of course because we are quilting today. And the cool thing
about this is once you have all your work done, you can just chain piece. So I might
sew this one. And then I’ll grab another one but I don’t chain piece everything.
I only chain piece the groups of fabric that match. That might sound a little confusing
so let me show you. So when I’m done with all my chain piecing, I have all of these
parts and pieces like this. But you notice all of my orange is the same orange. So I’m
just going to reiterate that the same yellow stays with the same orange for all four blocks
you’re making. So when I was piling up my parts and pieces, what I would do is I would
take all of my fussy cut, er excuse me all of my strip piece parts and I would put them
on this stack of yellow and then I would set them aside. And came back and built all of
the blocks once all of the cutting and all of the chain piecing was built. Whew! Kind
of a mouthful. Let’s make sure we’ve got all we need to get you onto the piecing part
of our project today. And I think that what I want to do is have one of these and a little
pair of scissors. There’s a small little pair for us. Just need to cut these chains
apart. For each of the squares or each of the blocks you’re going to need one of your
short ones and one of your long ones. But we start with the long one. Ok. So now I’m
going to take the long one and I’m looking at the block as I’m heading into the sewing
machine right here. So it always sews onto the upper left corner of the rectangle we’ve
created. So if you were looking at it at home, it would look just like this. And I’m going
to fold this over and I’m going to go right into the machine. And the math all works perfectly
that’s why accuracy is so important. You can start on either end of your seam allowance
here. As a general rule of thumb I try to put my biggest piece of fabric against my
feed dogs so my yellow is down against there. That’s really easy. And this part I’m
really not going to chain piece. I’m going to do these one at a time because that’s
kind of the fun of block construction for me. And so that means that when I’m done
I’m going to come over here and I’m going to press this open like you see here. Here’s
another example while I’m getting that all finished up.
Now what happens is we’re going to take one of those short ends. And the short end
is going to lay out. And this is my check or my trick. I make sure that my orange fabrics
are going to touch at the seam allowance back here which means I have my gray on opposite
ends of the block. So again, I’m just going to lay this like this and approach the machine
for my quarter inch seam allowance . Oh, got a little jumpy. I’m wondering who was giving
my sewing machine coffee on break there. Ok. So we just go through and construct all of
those real simple. And then the last and final steps to creating each block is to sew that
background fabric on.
And the background fabric, again, start with the long one on the long side, ok? So that’s
going to lay on right here so it will finish like this. Let’s sew that on for you.
Some of you caught that one of my pieces ran a little bit long I was pulling, no problem.
You can see it’s going to end up in the seam allowance that will never be seen in
the quilt. Ok, and pressing between each seam allowance so that we have nice construction.
And then I’m going to finish with one of those little seven inch or the short pieces
of the gray. And that will go along the bottom of the block just like this.
Now those of you who follow along on our Facebook and our Instagram, our social media, you saw
a few weeks ago I posted a photograph of sewing in a hotel room. And I was actually working
on this quilt, getting ready to come out and, and show you all how to do it. And I posted
it so that if I had a problem with accuracy, that I could have an excuse because I was
working out of a hotel room. But as you can see in the quilt behind me, I didn’t need
the excuse. But let’s use this as an example of how we’re going to start to position
all of our blocks back together. Or how does Rob handle his color management, right? So
the first thing I did is I use that hotel room bed as, hey this is a perfect design
wall, laid it all out. And I started up here in the corners so my darkest blocks are in
all four corners. So there’s one here. There’s one over here. There’s going to be one down
here. And then again behind me over here. Just like that, ok? And then if you look,
we’ll just use this corner for the rest of the example. So my darkest and then these
were kind of the next darks in the pallette. And then moving into my lights. And then as
I worked my way to the center of the quilt, what I found was the same print showed up
as it should have in all four spaces so I wanted a little bit of variety. I’m not
sure if you can tell from that far away at home but this fabric is different than this
fabric and that’s different than this fabric. So even though I’m dealing with very similar
fabrics, I’m not using the same two touching each other. So join me at the table here.
I’m not joining the exact same fabrics ever touching each other or next to each other.
So I would have a different fabric in here. But I want to show you right here how awesome
this goes together because what you did by building in that gray is you already built
your sashing and so you have built your shadow on your block and your sashing so when you
join one block to the next, it’s all done. It’s fantastic. So once you construct all
forty pieces or all forty blocks together, your gray is already here and it’s already
below all the rows. So we’re just going to take a few extra 1 ½ inch strips of the
gray fabric and we’re going to join two pieces together to make the entire top row.
There’s just one seam allowance up there. And the same over here. See that little spin
move, I’ve been going to dance class. So you’ve got the other one over here with
another seam allowance in it. Ready for the spin? Just like that, ok? Perfect. So the
inner borders go on or finishing up the shadowing of the background. And now it’s time to
build our borders.
I’ll try to go fairly quickly on the borders. It’s real easy. But remember that last stack
of, of oranges we had? I found that I needed eight of the ten squares. So I literally pulled
out the two deepest oranges and I kind of set them aside for later. Not sure what later
is but set them aside. And then for these, I literally now went back into like what I
did with the yellows which was a sub-cut of five inches by ten inches. And then I just
began in color order constructing a whole run of the five inch pieces by ten inch pieces
just like this. And the reason I did this at first is I started using these blocks in
laying them out onto the quilt but then it was just going to match right up into my other
squares. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that feel. So I wanted them to be shorter.
And that’s how you can see they look a little bit smaller, a little bit more petite for
the border so they don’t catch as much of your attention. So once all of this was put
together, right? Then I went ahead and I sub-cut this into 1 ½ inch strips again. Easiest
way to do this is just fold it. Let’s get this out of the way. Spin it because I’m
right handed. And then I just took and created the 1 ½ inch strips. And you can see that
adds a lot of impact now that we have those smaller pieces. And you just sew a few of
those ends together and they’re just going to drop right into the project right there,
right? Super easy. And now the outer border is also of your background or your neutral
fabric. I cut those at three inch wide strips. So all in all I used the entire ten inch by
ten inch square of the Wilmington Sunny Sides up minus the two squares I didn’t use in
the borders and those little one inch pieces. I did use 2 ½ yards of the background fabric
and that includes the binding you see on the quilt behind me. And I have to make a small
confession right now. You know I love my machine quilting. This one I was running shy on time.
Did you know that the MSQC actually offers a machine quilting service as well? So I jumped
on their website, mailed them the quilt. When I showed up here to film today, the quilt
was waiting for me. So when I say it couldn’t have been easier, almost as if it was magic,
I’m not fooling you today. And you know I love these illusion quilts. And you know
I love magic tricks. So I want to hear what’s your favorite magic trick while I’m dreaming
up new things to show you here at Man Sewing.