It is time. That’s right the Man Sampler is all quilted and it is time for me to teach
all of you how to square up your quilts. Let’s get started.
That’s right the man sampler has been completely free motion machine quilted and you’ve seen
that used in a lot of our cool skills and drills of free motion machine quilting. A
lot of those videos out there for all of you. But thinking backwards before we can even
square a quilt we should also be considering keeping our blocks square in our construction.
So I’ve got this little sample. And yes this one was made for our Stitch in the Ditch
video, right? But as you look in here you can see that of course number one, finished
is always better than perfect. But number two as I did try to keep my squares in my
half square triangles and my interior borders crisp and square as I was building my blocks.
So the more squares in a quilt the more you want to keep them square as you assemble to
keep your quilt square. But today’s video is all about the quilt that has been quilted.
How do we trim off the edges, how do we prepare for our binding and make it look awesome.
So the first key I’m always thinking about is that I look at the seam allowance itself
between where the patchwork of the project meets the last border or the last seam. If
you don’t have borders on your use the squares that are coming together here to find a seam
allowance that you’ll put your ruler on. And when I’m doing this here is I’m actually
going to use the lines of my ruler along the seam allowance that was created to make my
cut. So the first thing I’m evaluating here is right now I’m sitting on a two inch mark
on my ruler. If I slide this out to 2 ⅛ I can still see that I would be trimming down
my pinked edges. If a little bit of the edge of the border falls out of the trimming, it’s
not a problem because we’re going to be still wrapping our binding around. But the
first cut you’re evaluating how wide will you truly make your borders. So for me and
this video and life being easy, let’s use two inches because it’s an easy big line
to find on our ruler. And I’m literally lining it up as I said to the seam where the
border meets. And then if I have to do any encouraging along the way I can. But I don’t
want to tug too much but I want my border strip to look perfectly square. Next trick
is make sure you’ve got a fresh and good, clean, brand new blade in your cutter so that
you can make one nice even cut all the way through with good pressure. We don’t want
you sawing back and forth, right? I just want a nice even, easy cut.
Now as I come around for my corners the next thing that becomes important to me is that
I want to make sure that I’m looking at both of my lines while I’m working. So I’ll
be looking at the two inch mark on the inner seam allowance here. But I’m also now looking
down here to make sure that this line is running square as well to keep everything beautiful
and crisp looking because the trick is having that outer seam look really sharp. And then
the whole quilt will appear to be perfectly constructed, right? We’re going to spin
this around here just so you can see it all coming together. Always looking again for
that two inch mark. Now this is a good spot to look at. If you look right down in here
you can probably see that things have drifted in that corner. Now part of that was my construction
when I built the quilt, ok, that happens. It happens to all of us. But the other thing
we can do is we can kind of manipulate this back in a little bit and cheat. And what I’m
going to do is I’m going to put pressure down here on the ruler. And then as I pull
the ruler up throughout the seam, I’m now lining up the seam allowance underneath that
two inch mark. I still have pressure down here to keep that looking very square. Checking
my lines here. And now I’m going to go ahead and make that two inch cut. Just like yay.
And I’ve got one last one to do. And the nice thing is when I come back around here
I’m going to lay out that two inch strip. And now I’m looking at the top and I’m
looking at the bottom lines. And when they all come back together I get this big smile
on my face because that is telling me that I am square on all four corners. Or true on
all four corners. Ok, so just like I did after the quilted version I’m just again reencouraging
you to always make sure that your blocks are as square or as crisp as possible as you begin
your assembly.
Now it’s easy when we’re doing small stuff and that’s why we made our Man Sampler quilt,
right? Because the man sampler is a bigger than life quilt with all kinds of fun little
patch works from our other videos we’ve done. So this thing is a monster, right? And
again it’s all free motion machine quilted. But just because your quilt is big doesn’t
mean that any of these techniques need to change. So what I want you to do. Now I should
point this out. I get so excited about this I go a little too fast. I apologize. I did
rotate my mat so my mat is running long ways because I want to be able to make as long
of cuts as possible here. So the mat is going long this way because I’m going to begin
cutting right now. Now I’m set up so I’ve got a lot of the weight on the table. But
if any of my quilt feels like it wants to drag or gravity is working against me, I’m
going to take everything that I’m not squaring and I’m keeping it up on my table. But you’ll
notice I have nothing but just this single layer of quilt. I don’t have any quilt hidden
underneath here because I don’t want to cut anything I don’t to cut, right?
Now, here we are. I start on a corner. And again I’m looking at my seam allowance something
where my borders come together. I’m going to find myself a nice spot on my ruler. And
it looks like 2 ¾. I could probably go out to three. Looking at that line. And you can
see just gravity alone right now is allowing me to manipulate this a little bit there.
So you always have to make a first cut. Try to get your first cut as square to the rest
of the quilt as possible. But we always have to cut somewhere first, ok? So I’m just
doing my best. Come back here. I’m going to cut through here. Now before I teach you
how to manipulate the rest of this let’s just get this out of the way. So I’m just
going to cut it like this so that it’s now flopping out of my way. And it’s safe. As
I need to continue making longer cuts, obviously my ruler wasn’t long enough. So now my trick
is I use at least half of the ruler along the cut edge. So if I was sliding this up,
you probably can’t see much. I can also pull my quilt to my body. So I’m making
good body mechanics in my cutting. But what I’m trying to teach you is I don’t want
you to only use two inches. So you have a longer amount of ruler out here. You can get
way out of square. And I know I’ve asked you to follow that seam allowance but still
this gives everything really, really working beautiful together. So I’ve got about half
of my ruler still where I was cut as I finish this out. Ok, I’m just going to slide this
up. I’m heading toward that last corner now.
And if you did not have borders in your quilts using the ruler, more of the ruler as a safer
trick because you are squaring off of your first cut. With my border I can cheat because
I know that I’m using that for my number as well. Now the last key to doing this is
to go nice and slow and take your time with this big quilt. So I will not ask you to sit
through the rest of the trimming. But I’m going to turn up the music and I’ll keep
trimming this out while you watch me just so you can get a feel of the step by step
process of sliding the ruler, cutting, looking at those lines. But I just want to thank all
of you. This was for all of you because you asked me to show you how. So please keep asking
me these great questions in the comments below. And we’ll see you right here next time at
Man Sewing.
Thanks for being a
Man Sewing fan. It’s great to have you out there encouraging me to create fantastic new
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