Grand Adventures Quilt Tutorial

with
Jenny Doan

Grand Adventures Quilt Tutorial

Quilt Size: 90" x 87"
Time: 10 Minutes
Jenny Doan demonstrates how to make Grand Adventures with 10 inch squares of precut fabric (layer cakes). She uses Wildwood Way Digitally Printed Patty Cake by RJR Studio for RJR Fabrics. This quilt is based on an old pattern called Delectable Mountains. Learn how to make a giant half square triangle and sashing with snowball cornerstones.
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video transcript

Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I have a great project for you. This is based on an old block called Delectable Mountains. And we have made it new and usable by using pre cuts to do it. Let’s take a look at this quilt behind me. Isn’t this great? I mean it’s got these great little up and down movement. It makes kind of a sob lady thing in here. Just so many elements in this quilt and so many things you can do with it. So to make this quilt, what you’re going to need is one packet of printed ten inch squares. And we have used Wildwood Way by Florian Finch for RJR. You’re also going to need 40 ten inch background squares and some yardage. The yardage, your background yardage is going to put this little border all the way around it. And you’re going to need ¾ of a yard for that. For the outer border you’re going to need a yard and ¾. And it’s a 6 ½ inch border. So nice big border. It makes a quilt that is about 91 by 88 so it’s a great size quilt and really a fun project to make. So let me show you how to do this.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take one ten inch square and we’re going to take one printed ten inch square. Now on our background square we’re going to go ahead and iron a line that’s going to be our sew line right down the middle. And you can either iron the line or draw the line. So we’re just going to fold that diagonally, iron the line. This gives us an ironed sew line. You want to put your printed fabric down first and you want to put your ten inch square on top of it. Make sure that your ironed line is going down. If you, if you flip it over, it’s just way easier to sew in the ditch than it is to sew on top of the mountain. And if you put it the other way that line is going to come up like this and make it a little harder to sew on. So we have ours this way and sew a quarter of an inch on either side of that line. And we’re going to go to the sewing machine and do that. We’re making a giant half square triangle and we just want to sew a quarter of an inch on either side of that line. So set up your machine and go right down. Put your presser foot right on the side. Go all the way down, flip it around and come up the other side. Now you want to be pretty careful about this quarter of an inch because what we’re going to do, the measurements are going to matter on what we’re going to do.

So first thing we’re going to do right now is we’re going to cut this in half diagonally just like this. Right on our fold line. We’re using our fold line as our guide, corner to corner. And then we’re going to press these open. You’re going to do this to 40 of your squares, just 40 not 42 but just 40. Like this, I’ll go ahead and do both of them. So once you get your seams all nice and flat then we’re going to take our two half square triangles over here and you’re going to want to separate them into two piles. So these are, you know if I line these up they’re exactly the same but we need to cut them differently so we have one block coming this way and one block coming this way to form that mountain. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make two piles of ours. There will be 20 of these squares in each pile and, and then you’ll be able to cut them. So now we’re going to cut these into strips. What you want to do because our block is now 9 ½ it is no longer ten inches, you want to take the finished size of your block and you want to divide that by four strips. So the finished size of your block divided by four will give you your strip size. Our strip size is now 2 ⅜. That’s because we want four equal pieces. Now 2 ⅜ is a little different measurement so what I’ve done here is I’ve taken a piece of painter’s tape right here and I’ve put it on the 2 ⅜. The ⅜ line is the little line just before the half. And so this will remind me because I might remember on the first four but by the time I start cutting them and I’m automatically cutting I’m going to go right to that 2 ½ . And they’re just going to and if you do that this one is not going to be the same size. So we want to do these at 2 ⅜ . And we’re going to cut them just like this. We’ll move that one out of the way. We’ll line our ruler up right along the edge of that. And you’re going to cut four of these out of each half square triangle. And you want to make sure your blocks are oriented the right way. So this one is, so this one is, we want these to go opposite ways. Don’t forget that, that’s really important. Alright so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to turn these strips around. So we’re just turning them around right upside down like this. We’re going to sew these together. And it’s going to make the first half of that mountain block.

So we’re just going to go over and we’re going to sew these together a quarter of an inch and I’ve got my quarter of an inch lined up here. You want to be pretty accurate on these quarter of an inch. You know sometimes it doesn’t matter. On this quilt it matters. So once you get that done, we’re going to press these open. It’s a good idea for all of your seams on the back to go the same direction. So I’m just going to lay this on here. Press from the top, flip it over. And then you’re just going to add the next strip and the next strip until you have a block that looks like this. I can’t get my fingers under there. Alright so your block looks like this. You’re going to make four of those. It takes two from each block orientation to make the block. So let me show you that. Because you want them to come together like this. And actually we’re going to put our colors together. We want to put our colors together. That’s what’s so fun about a quilt like this is if I just turn those the other way they’re going to do a whole different thing. Now one of the things you have to remember is that these are now taller than they are wide so you can’t actually turn them. You can’t make a mistake and put them wrong. But you can do this. So, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to put these together, four of them like this, just like that. That makes our block. So now what we do is we’re going to sew a quarter of an inch on this seam. A quarter of an inch on this seam and then sew the whole middle together like a four patch and that’s going to make our big block for our quilt. And we’ll just do that to all of our pieces. And then we’re going to press this out and see what we’ve got.

Alright, oh this is so pretty. Alright our center seam looks good. Everything else matched up really nice. And this is your finished block right here. Isn’t that fun? Really fun. So let’s look at the quilt behind me so we can see how we set these together. Now we’ve got one, two, three, four, five across and we’ve got, because they make such long blocks, we’ve got five big blocks across and one, two, three, four down. And it makes almost a square quilt. You know, and just remember if you want yours a different shape you just add more blocks, just add more blocks. So then what we do is we just sew these together. And I’ve got some sewn together right here we can show you. So we just sewed four of these across like this. And look it makes this little diamond in the middle.

So once you get your quilt top all together we are ready to add that first border. Now the first border across the top and bottom is just a straight 2 ⅜ strip. And remember we did, we are using 2 ⅜, that’s a little bit different size. But we wanted it to match our strip size. So also then when you come down the sides we did something a little different, we put these little cornerstones in here, snowballed our strips so that we could finish out this little diamond. And it just gives it that little finishing touch. So how we did that was the very top strip right here is only 9 ½ inches. It’s the width of the block. That’s the first time we hit one of those diamonds. But the next three pieces are 18 inches and so what you’re going to do is you’re going to cut your these background ones 2 ⅜ and then you’re going to cut some 2 ⅜ inch squares off of your two leftover pieces that you did not use making your mountain blocks. We’re going to sew diagonally corner to corner. Trim that off, iron that back. So then when we put them together, they’re going to go together like this. And it’s going to make that outside peak and you want to do the same thing on both sides. Once you get those on you’re going to add your bigger outer border. And your quilt is going to be finished.

So we hope you enjoyed this quilt. It’s a fun new way of setting blocks together. We’re calling it Grand Adventure because it’s just like climbing mountains. And we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on the Grand Adventure quilt from the MSQC.

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