This week, we cut all our fabric and complete the first steps in making each block.
Cutting Fabric
The task of cutting all your fabric for the Strawflower quilt may be the most time-consuming task of this entire quilt top. Because of the multiple 1″ cuts at various lengths, it can be tedious. If you set aside some time this week, I am certain you will get through all these small cuts. It will be worth it too. If you have a stripology ruler, now may be the time to get it out. With a stripology ruler, you can make several WOF x 1″ cuts without picking up the ruler. It can be a real timesaver.
I suggest you cut through most of your fabric to get started, but if you are making a mix-and-match quilt, you may want to get through about 70% of the fabric and stop. I’ll tell you why next.
Mixing and Matching
If you are making a traditional strawflower quilt, you do not need to worry about this step. You have already chosen and cut your pieces knowing exactly where they will go in your consistent blocks. If you are making the mix & match version, the next step is to mix up all the fabric you cut into unique blocks. For each block, you will select the fabric choice for each piece (A-H) from a different fabric. The one exception is pieces G and H need to be from the same fabric to have a matching background.
My method for mixing fabrics is to start with what stands out the most in each block. The background and the star points are the most noticeable pieces of each block so I want to make sure 1.) the combination of the two fabrics within each block is good, and 2.) the overall combination of these two fabrics between all the blocks for the quilt is good.
I cut almost all my fabric before I started mixing. You can see in the image below, that I used more than the recommended 8 fabrics for the throw. Since I naturally dyed all my fabric, this was easiest for me. I was able to use some smaller pieces that did not meet the fabric requirements by using a larger variety of fabric. I was very hesitant about the brightest red and yellow in my color palette. Initially, I decided the red was too much and I would only be using it for smaller pieces. However, once I laid out my choices for the background and star points, I really, really liked the pop of red, but I had mixed feelings about the bright yellow. I took the opportunity to cut more red and change it out with the bright yellow. You may not have any wiggle room in your fabric amount for this, but if you do, I would suggest making some mix-and-match decisions before you cut every single piece. Below, you can see the progression of fabric from cutting, to choosing the background and star points, to the end of mixing.
After the star points and background are chosen, I honestly give little thought to the remainder of the fabrics. I make sure that I never use a fabric twice in the same block, but otherwise, I trust that my initial fabric selections are good and will result in beautiful blocks.
Sewing Square-in-a-Square
The first sewing task for the strawflower quilt is to sew the square-in-a-square blocks. If you have some sewing experience, likely, you have already come across these blocks. The strawflower blocks add extra steps to this traditional block by adding a skinny border around each square. Let’s talk about sewing these small 1″ strips around each square. It’s easy when sewing skinny strips onto a block to have them look wonky or not straight. However, there are two ways to avoid this. First, make sure you double-check your seam allowance and use a seam guide on your sewing machine. I use seam tape by Cluck Cluck Sew to guide my pieces as I sew. Second, pressing and not ironing is very important for these pieces. After sewing the 1″ strips onto the block, gently finger-press the seam (shown below), then press down once with your iron. Make sure you do not move the iron back and forth because that will stretch the fabric creating a wonky (not straight) line.
Making a square-in-a-square block simply involves sewing triangles onto the edge of each side of the original square. It’s important when sewing the first two triangles onto opposite sides of the square to make sure the triangle points overlap one another in the middle of the square. After sewing these first two triangles, press, and repeat on the other two sides. The ends of the triangles will overlap creating dog ears once all four sides have been sewn on to create a square in a square. Trim off the dog ears and make sure the square measures 4 7/8″ before moving on to the final step. You can see the progression of my square-in-a-square block below.
This week, we try to sew all of our square-in-a-square blocks. For me, this was 16 blocks since I am making a large throw. Next week, we will move on to sewing the points in our stars.
