Hi I’m Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company.  Take a look at this cute little quilt behind me.  Isn’t that darling? This is made with “Little Black Dress Fabric” by Moda, Basic Gray makes it and this is their second “Little Black Dress 2”and I just love this fabric.  I love the colors.  It’s just beautiful, beautiful fabric and everybody needs a little black dress.  One of the fun things that I’ve been noticing lately is people are doing a lot of things with zippers.  You know zippers are becoming a fashion statement, they’ll you know, they show their teeth, they use them on the fronts, they use them on the backs, they’re using them in jewelry.  Zippers are the cool thing.  So we decided to make a zipper quilt and I just want to show you a fun and easy way to do that.

So to make this quilt behind me what I did was I used one charm pack and about a yard of black fabric.  Now what we’re going to do with this charm pack is we’re going to cut it in half and make two and a half inch strips.  Right here just like this and so if you want a bigger quilt, you could even use the jelly roll.  A Jelly roll will give you about a twin size quilt, but that’s just an idea for you.  Today I’m going to show you with a charm pack.  

So I have my yard of black fabric right here and the yard is going to make all the little squares and it’s going to make all the sashing’s and this first border.  So what we’re going to do is we are going to cut our yard.  We can just go ahead and cut the whole thing into two and half inch strips if you want.  Or you can use a black jelly roll.  I often keep a black jelly roll handy I just, I love that they’re already precut.  So what, I just going to cut a few strips here and you’ll notice on my fabric this is a whole big yard right here.  Let me show you.  The whole, this is the whole yard piece and I just folded in half, because then there’s less cutting area and there’s less chance of my, my rotary cutter going, getting a mind of its own and going crazy.  

So I just go ahead and fold it in half.  I make sure that it is lined up evenly.  That my selvedge edge is lined up straight across the top and that I’m lined up on my mat.  If you find that when you cut a long strip it has a little elbow it’s because your fabric isn’t folded straight.  So just check that.  Cut one and check it.

So what I’m going to do is cut these into two and a half inch strips.  Just like this.  And I, you can go ahead and cut your whole thing, cause everything you use is going to be two and a half inch strips, but then we’re going to cut some squares how I like to do my squares is I like to put a couple of my strips just in a row like this.  And I’m going to go ahead and cut off the selvedge and the fold like this.  That’s a little wasteful, but I know that out of each two and half inch strip I’m going to get sixteen squares.  So that’s a lot of squares out of each strip.

So then I just go ahead and move over and I cut both of them at the same time.  This will speed up your cutting a little bit, because what we’re doing is we’re cutting two and a half inch squares just like this.  So then we’re just going to stack these over here in a pile, because we’re going to be using those and it looks like I can get one more cut out of this.  There we go.  And then we’ve got to get our charm pack ready.

So the charm pack, basically what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our five inch squares from the charm pack and we’re going to cut them in half.  So you can, you can stack up about four of these if you want, but it basically it’s going to give you a two and a half by five inch rectangle.  Then to the end of each rectangle we’re going to attach a square.  So we’ll put that on here like this.  Right sides together.  We’ll sew our quarter of an inch and let me go do a couple of these.  We’ll go over to the sewing machine and do these.

So here we are.  And again do your quarter of an inch, just make sure it’s consistent.  And you can chain piece these.  So once you get all your charms cut and all your squares cut, you can just bring them over here with your stacks and you can just chain piece them one after another after another.  And it goes together super fast.  This is a really fast quilt.  I’ve seen it done in baby fabric too.  It’s just so cute.

Alright, now you want to press these back and you want to iron to the dark side.  And I’m going to just press that back, roll it back.  There we go.  And then we’re going to lay these out.  Now this is a little different.  This layout is a little different than a normal quilt, because we’re going to lay this out in vertical rows like this.  So I have nineteen in each row, but depending upon how many pieces you have you’ll just divide that by the number of rows that you have.  And so for this quilt there’s nineteen in each row and what you’re going to do is you’re going to lay out your pieces like this and then you’re going to put the next one just opposite.  So here we go.  Here let me scoot these down here a little bit.  So I can reach them.  And then we’re just going to do like this.  See how those are going together?  Just like that and then we’ll and then you just start sewing the row together.  

When you get your row together, you’re going to take, let me cut off one more two and a half inch strip here so I can show you this sashing.  What do they say, measure twice, cut once?  I wish I could say I always remember to do that.  I’ve made a few boo boo’s in my time.  And then this sashing strip right here, we’re going to leave these whole for these middle pieces right here.  And you can see one strip, we’ll do the whole length of the quilt.  So that makes it really easy to sash.  

So let’s go ahead and sew a few of these together so you can see what I’m doing.  What’s really nice about this, no seams to line up.  Nothing.  You just lay them right sides against each other.  And when I’m doing this kind of thing, what I do is I sew, sets of twos, sets of four’s and I just keep, I just chain piece them and keep going down and, and sewing them together.  So make sure they line up.  No seams to match at all and I’m going to sew two and then I’m going to sew two more and just make sure they’re going opposites.  And here’s the next one.  Make sure they’re opposite and make sure they’re lined up.  So then when I get all my sets of two together, whoops, then I’ll come along and I’ll sew them in fours.

So here are our two’s and you can press these.  I’m just going to finger press for a moment.  Make sure they’re opposite and now we’re going to sew them together to make groupings of four and you just lay them right sides together and do the same thing.  Make sure they’re opposite.  Make sure they’re lined up.  And you’re going to make long strips, nineteen of these in a row.  And then we’re just going to iron this open right here.  Just like that.  And I kind of like to iron the front first and then I like to go along and just make sure they’re all, all those seams are laying down the same direction.  

So then you have this piece like this. Now yours is going to be long and then you’re going to attach your sashing in between your rows.  So when you go to attach sashing you’re going to put it right sides together, you’ll sew all the way down one side attaching this whole row.  Then you’ll attach it to the whole next row.

So before you know it you’re going to have a darling little zipper quilt that looks just like this.  So the next things you’re going to do is you’re going to put your border all the way around the outside and again you’re just using these two and half inch strips. And then the outside border, this is just a four inch strip of fabric and you’re going to need five of those.  So for your outside border, four times five, you’re going to need twenty inches or about three, I’d probably get three quarters of a yard.  So we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on the fun and easy “Zipper Quilt.”  From the Missouri Star Quilt Company.