If you’re dying to make a super simple quilt that everybody will love and has flannel on
the back so you’ll snuggle in it for hours, right?
This buffalo plaid is the one for you.
Let’s get started.
Shay Henderson is one of my favorite quilt designers out there.
She made a great Star Wars patchwork that caught my eye years ago.
And she actually created this buffalo plaid pattern for you.
She’s got a free printable that you can print out and follow along over at emptybobbinsewing.com
And not only that, look at this, she’s got all of these great instructions and a complete
yardage calculation for everything you need for any size, making your own buffalo plaid.
So just go on over to her website and print out the free instructions.
And follow this video as I walk you through it today, ok?
What I’m using is some wonderful Robert Kaufman solids.
And you’re going to need for your quilt top three different colors.
A light, a medium and a dark.
Now you’re going to use twice as much medium.
So for example if you’re buying a yard of the light and a yard of the dark, you’ll
have two yards of your medium because the medium is the companion print that checkerboards
throughout the whole thing, right?
And then of course you’ll need to get the fantastic shetland flannel which is also from
Robert Kaufman.
And I’ve done some fun scarves with this flannel and a couple of other projects.
And this stuff sews like butter and feels even better than that.
So I love this stuff.
And it makes a great backing for any snuggly quilt, right?
Let me get this stuff out of the way today.
We’re going to need our whole ironing board.
Because we’re going to make these in strips, we’re sewing these together in strip sets
to help manage the efficiency and our cutting for accuracy actually.
So I want you to take all of your yardage, however much you’re using.
And I’m going to have you make five inch strips.
And remember you’re going to need two mediums, one dark and one light for every, let’s
just call it, band within the quilt.
And you’re going to go ahead and start by sewing your lights and mediums together.
And we’re going to do four strips all sewn.
I’m going to show you that here in a second.
And they you’ll also sew your mediums and your darks together.
So as I said let’s get to stitching.
And I’m going to take my dark and my medium.
And I’m just going to kind of match-up on the selvedge end there.
And I’m just going to start sewing.
We’ll be trimming off the selvedges to make that clean first cut as we begin sub cutting
our strip sets down.
Boy that sounds like a lot of information, I hope it didn’t sound confusing.
I’m doing a quarter inch seam allowance.
And my presser foot has gone on vacation so I’m just going to slide it over here real
quick.
And I’ve got cotton thread in.
And my little edge guide because I really want to go at a pace that I can get the quilt
done in an afternoon but also at a pace where I have got nice accurate seam allowances because
even though we’re building strip sets this is what’s going to help keep everything
square.
I backstitched there but there’s no real reason to, I’m going to cut the selvedge
off.
But might as well get in that habit, right?
Ok so now I have joined one of my mediums and one of my dark strips together, ok?
And then I’m also going to go ahead, and you can see I’ve done that twice.
Now I want to make sure I just joined medium, dark, medium, dark.
So I’m going to lay those right sides together, make one more nice long seam, as accurate
as possible.
And speaking of accuracy, one of the things I’m doing when I’m kind of sewing through
here is I’m never pushing or pulling.
I’m just kind of looking about six to eight inches down.
And what I try to do, I don’t know if you can see this or not, but I try to line up
both edges so I can barely see the dark fabric popping from under the medium fabric right
now.
And I’m just pinching and lining it up, letting the machine do all the work.
Ok we’re going to go to our ironing board and we’re going to press this whole seam
set open.
And I was trying to think, now what’s going to happen color wise is our medium color is
going to alternate throughout the quilt.
So I was thinking to myself, well if I press to the medium each time, would that help my
seam allowances so that when I’m marrying my strip set rows back together will that
help the seams?
And it can if you pay enough attention to it but funny enough when I start to rebuild
this watch what happens.
So just go ahead and press all in one direction as you go.
I don’t think we can outsmart our seam allowances in this one.
And I don’t think we need to be concerned about it either.
So I’m just going to take a second and press this.
But your pressing is also important because these seam allowances are going to help us
get really nice accurate cuts.
I’m going to show you that here under the big camera from the top in a second so you
can really see what I’m looking at with my ruler.
But I’ve got to get this pressed out a second.
So let me monkey around with this and I’ll be right back.
Hey welcome back.
I’ve got all my seams pressed nice and crisp all heading in one direction.
And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to start by trimming off our best edge
first.
This whole strip set should yield about eight of these sub cuts.
And so what I’m going to first do is even on my first cut I want to make sure things
are super, super accurate.
So I’m looking at the lines here on my ruler with the lines that are the seam allowance
lines because that’s what’s going to allow me to cut it and give the appearance of square
and straight in the actual project.
So my first cut is my trueing cut.
So I’m going to cut it like this, ok?
And then because I am so very right handed I’m going to spin my whole project.
Get my cutter back out here.
And I’m going to build these in sections of three.
So I’m just going to cut three for us now . But the best thing to do is make sure you
just cut everything all at once.
Go into a good old Henry Ford assembly line style.
Do all your sewing, all your cutting and then all your resewing that we’re going to do
here in a second.
So I’m going to focus on what I’m doing because I’m making five inch cuts now because
I had five inch strips, right?
So I’m going to make one.
And if your ruler were to shift you’d want to re-square because I want these lines and
this line perfectly square if I can do that.
I’m looking at all that.
It’s coming out perfect.
And then one more at five inches.
But like I said please go ahead and cut down everything you’ve stitched together.
But I want to show you the next step.
So from here we need three.
And I’m just going to now go ahead and join these in another kind of checkerboard fashion.
My medium and my dark here.
And I’ll just bring this one close.
Now for these you can backstitch because it will help secure it.
We don’t want things shifting around, coming loose as we work.
Another trick a lot of quilters will do is they’ll actually just make a smaller seam
allowance altogether.
So if I’m sewing at like a 2.5, folks will go to a 2.0.
But if you ever have to tear it out or black thread on black fabric, my goodness hard to
see.
Ok so I want to make sure I’m getting this right.
So my medium to my dark, right sides together.
We’re going to go ahead and drop this in.
And that’s all I needed was to combine three of those for the quilt that is the size behind
me.
So I did this with my medium dark family and I also did it with my medium light family.
And you can see I did lots and lots of strips.
So as we bring this back together you’re just going to go ahead and position everything.
And of course I would have ironed that out.
We’re just going to position everything so that my medium starts to checkerboard as
I go through.
So if I lay this one out and I see those colors touching, oh all I have to do is take this
and spin it 180 degrees.
And now it comes back together perfectly like that, ok?
So it’s a very, very fun quilt and a very, very easy to construct quilt.
It will actually help you with your straight line sewing and your accuracy in your cutting,
if that’s something that you’re personally practicing right now.
For me, like I said, I put the flannel on the backing because I want this to be a couch
quilt.
I want this to be a quilt that is used a lot.
And I love the flannel for snuggliness.
But because of that I also wanted a very large all over symmetrical quilting pattern.
So check this out, I actually sent this into the MSQC and had their longarming team to
machine quilt this very fun square in a square design because it fit the motif of the quilt.
And it made it nice and strong and well constructed so this can go in and out of the wash over
and over again.
And I liked the symmetry in this project in comparison to the free motion that I normally
do.
So every quilt tells a story and every quilt has a different approach to it, right?
This is a very fun project that gives you a huge world of opportunities design wise.
So what I’m looking forward to hearing from all of you is what you did with your very
first Buffalo Plaid quilt.
We’ll catch you next time right here at Man Sewing.
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