Jenny shows us how to make the Cutting Corners quilts using 2.5 inch strips of precut fabric or jelly roll (we used Sevilla Blues by Andrea Komninos) and 10 inch squares or layer cake. Learn how to make strips sets and turn them into half square triangles.

Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I’ve got such a fun project for you today. Let’s take a look at this quilt behind me. Isn’t this fun? It’s a gorgeous quilt. Basically we’re talking about here is a half square triangle but we’ve made it with a strip set. So that makes it really, really fun.

So to make this quilt what you’re going to use is 40 2 ½ inch strips. And we have used Sevilla Blues by Andrea Komninos for Benertex. And it’s just a really fun line. You can see all those blues and greens. I mean just a gorgeous line. Then you’re going to need background fabric. And we used about three yards or you can buy a packet of ten inch squares. That will also work, of whatever color you choose. We chose white. And I just can hardly wait to show you how to make this because it’s really fun. So basically we are going to sew a strip set together. Five strips, just like this. And, but there’s a trick to doing that because when you go to sew strips, if you sew them one after the other after the other, they can actually bow. And I don’t know why they do this. This is like a universal mystery. Nobody really knows why they do that. But the way to get around that is you’re going to sew two together like this. And you’re going to put your right sides together, just like this and sew down it this way. When you go to add your third strip, you’re going to add it going to other direction. So let’s go to the sewing machine and do that so you can see that a little better.

So we’re just going to sail along this edge right here, a quarter of an inch. We’ve got our two strips lined up. So once you get to the end of your two strips that you’ve sewn together, you’re going to keep ahold of this end that you just ended on, and you’re going to add your next strip to the side and you’re going to sew. And it will be going the other direction. So it will be, now you’ve sewn this way, now you’re coming back up the other way. And you’re going to sew those just a quarter of an inch. And you’re going to keep going this way going back and forth until you have sewn five strips together.

So now that you’ve got your five strips together, just like this, we need to cut them into squares. Now this should be, ideally, ten inches. Let’s check and see if it is. It is very close to ten. So let’s go ahead. We’re going to cut this off, cut off our selvedges. Make sure it stays lined up. Trim that off. And we’re going to come in ten and make a cut. And do that to our whole strip set. So once you get your squares cut, you’ll have a little leftover piece and who knows what we’re going to do with that. But then you’re going to deal with these squares right here.

So let’s take one of these. Let’s just move all these down here. And we’re going to make sure that we’re ten inches. So I’m putting it on my  mat here to measure it up. Make sure. We’re a hair over. So I’m just going to kind of clean up those edges. Just barely, little tiny bits, clean them up. And then what we’re going to do is we are going to take this square and pair it with a ten inch background square. So here’s our ten inch background square. We’re going to lay those right sides together. Now what we’re going to do is what you’ve seen me do a ton of times. We are going to sew all the way around the outside edge.

So let’s go to the sewing machine and do that. Now it doesn’t really matter which direction your stripes run. You just going to put that ten inch square on top and we are going to sew down, around the whole thing. Once you get your block sewn all the way around a quarter of an inch on all four sides. And you want to make sure, you actually really want to look at that quarter of an inch because that’s what’s going to mean that your blocks come out the same size. Then what we’re going to do is we are going to cut this diagonally both directions. This is one of the reasons I love this ruler is because it just goes right, it will, allows me to cut them diagonally both directions. This is one of my favorites. So we’re going to cut that. And we’re going to come over this way, make a diagonal cut both directions. And then we’ve got these blocks right here. Are these not so cool. Alright let’s press these back. We’ll go over here to the ironing board. And I’m going to set my seams. And then I’m just going to turn them over so my dark stripy side is to the top because we want that seam allowance on the darker side of the fabric. So we’re pressing to the dark side. And we’re just going to do that to all of these. And you see very quickly when we start looking at these blocks, they’re running different directions which I just think is so much fun.

Alright so here we have these right here. And you see, see how, see how the stripes on this one run this way and on this one they run this way. You don’t really notice that at all in the quilt behind you, do you? It just gives, it just gives it that mixed up fun scrappy look. And we don’t notice it. So we’re not paying attention to that, we’re not worrying about it at all. What we’re doing with these is we are going to set these, just line them up, just like this. So our, our white is always going to be on the bottom left. And when we put our rows together, that’s how they’re going to go, just like this. Let me get it down here so you can make sure you can see this really good. There we go. So they’re always going to point up just like these, see how these point up to the top. Really, really fun. And then you’re just going to sew your twos and twos together like this. And then you’re going to start sewing your rows together. And pretty soon you’re going to have a quilt that is finished. This makes a quilt that is 60 by 72. But  I just want you to remember, this is a half square triangle. So any of the things I have done with any of the half square triangles you can do with this block. And there are a ton of things you can do with this block.

So on this quilt we’ve got ten blocks, 12 rows. So ten blocks in each row. You’re going to do that 12 times. And it just makes a great quilt. Again it’s 60 by 72. We’re calling it Cutting Corners because you actually cut from corner to corner. So we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on the Cutting Corners quilt from the MSQC.