Jenny: Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. And I am here today with Misty. Misty, we’re such goof balls over here. Anyway today’s tutorial is really fun because it is the quilt that we made at our birthday bash sew off, right? So at the sew off we have two teams. My team was me and Sue Daley and Shannon and then a bunch of the designers came and helped. Teresa Coates is always there and you know, just lots of designers are there. I think Amy Smart. Can you remember everybody?
Misty: Ya it was so fun and then Me and My Sister was on a different team.
Jenny: So Misty was on the other team with?
Misty: Yes
Jenny: With Me and My Sister, Barb and Mary Groves from Me and My Sister, Moda fabrics.
Misty: So fun.
Jenny: And we had people coming in out of the audience. And what we do is we have an hour and we race to make a quilt. So we’re actually going to show you how to make both of those quilts. Now my quilt, I thought I had to make up something new. And so this was the quilt we came up with right here. And this was the birthday bash one. You guys have to look at this. Now you have to know that Sue Daley and Shannon are English paper piecers so they made this English paper pieced flower right in the center of the quilt. And I was making big squares like this that had the pinwheel in the center. I thought that the pinwheel would be fun. And when we added this border, the heart appeared. I didn’t even plan on the heart and it just appeared. So my quilt doesn’t have the flower, the English paper pieced flower in the middle. But we will actually include a little drawing for you so that you could put one in the middle if you want to. Because it was just really fun to see that all done.
Jenny: So to make this quilt, so thanks Misty. So to make this quilt what you’re going to need is one pack of ten inch squares and we’ve used Fresh as a Daisy by Rachel Shellburn for Maywood Studios. You’re going to need one pack of background squares, ten inch squares. And you’re also going to need some border fabric right here. This inner border is a 2 ½ inch inner border and what do we need here, ¾ of a yard, 2 ½ inch strips. This outer border is a five inch border and you’re going to need 1 ¼ yards on that. And it’s just a five inch strip. Look at the cute binding. I want you guys to look at this cute binding. Anytime I have a stripe in a line I love to use it on the binding. I just think it looks adorable. The backing for this quilt, look at that beautiful daisy. This is so so cute. For the backing you’re going to need 4 ½ yards. And it makes a great size quilt. It is 73 by 73. So it’s a really good size.
Alright let me show you how to make this. So in the sew off, what you’re looking for is quick and easy and amazing all at once. So I decided to do half square triangles where you sew the ten inch background square to the ten inch colored square like this. So you know we have those together. We sew all the way around the outside edge. And this makes it easy for anybody. They’ve got coming up in sewing or whatever. So I’ve already sewn this. Then what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut these diagonally like this, line it up corner to corner. Make a cut. And then we’re going to cut again corner to corner. And you’re going to do this with all your squares. And so we had, oh my gosh, we had people throwing squares. I’d get them finished, I’d toss them over my shoulder, somebody would grab them and iron them and somebody would give me another square. I mean we try to go so fast. There’s a lot of funny shenanigans that take place. If you want to watch this, you can go, it’s the birthday bash sew off video. It’s going to be on YouTube. It’s going to be on Facebook. It’s just really a lot of fun to watch. There was silly string involved. I mean it was just a lot of fun.
Alright so once you get your squares ready, if you want you can square them up. The time to do that is actually before you iron them unless you’re using a different kind of tool. I use the clearly perfect slotted trimmer. I’m going to put them up on here. Put my line on their line and square them up. Now for the sew off I did not square them up because we’re in a hurry and so we just made them work. Well what we did was, this is our block right here. We took these big half square triangles and see how this, let me show you how this fits in here. So here it is right here. Let me make sure I got it there. There we go, right there. So you can see how that fits. This part out here was a border we added to finish up the block. You know I’m a little OCD about my little points finishing. Well what happened when we did that was these hearts appeared. And this was such a happy serendipitous thing to see those hearts that we called the quilt Happy Hearts because that was really exciting. So let me show you how we put this together.
Alright now we just really scrapped it up. And so I’ve got a bunch of half square triangles over here that are already made and we’re just going to put it together. I always start with my pinwheel in the middle. That’s because I’m a little angley challenged and I have to make sure where I start from. Once I get a block done I will then assemble them in rows because I know how it goes but until then I get the pinwheel. Actually let me lay my block right here to make sure I’ve got my pinwheels going the right way. Now you want to make your pinwheels going all the same direction. And of course mine were turned. So like this. And when I put a pinwheel block together I always check, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark, all seams to the center. So that’s how I make my pinwheels work because I am quite a bit angley challenged. Then what I did was I wanted to make, I wanted to kind of frame up this block so what I did was I took my blocks and I put them together so that they framed out like this. So it makes these little mountain framework around my block like this. Oop, hang on. Here we are at the pinwheel, here we go. This way. This corner one I wanted to make a border so I turned my color in this way. So my color goes in this way. Now let’s finish the other side over here so you can see what I was doing. It was a crazy time but I promise you I had a plan. Alright so this one goes this way so that we’re making a block around our pinwheel. This one goes in here and this one goes over here. Alright so let me sew this together to show you how I did it.
I’m going to start with the pinwheel in the center right here. And this is just how my mind works. Those of you who are a little more analytical, you will build your block and sew rows together. But I literally start from the pinwheel. And this is where patterns play in my brain and so for some of you what I’m doing will make perfect sense. For those of you it doesn’t make perfect sense just go ahead and line out your rows and do it that way. So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to sew my pinwheel. And I’m doing a quarter of an inch right down the side. And I’m going to grab this because I’ve already folded it. I’m going to check to make sure that these are nested really tight right here, slide it under my needle and make sure these two blocks stay lined up. Now one of the benefits of cutting half square triangles like this is that they actually are on the bias so you can make them work. So here we’ve checked. Still looks like a pinwheel so I’m just going to fold this over and sew these two together. And so I’m going to lay this on here at the edge. When you have a block that is cut on the bias it has a little more movement so you can just make them behave. You have to be a little careful of that stretch but that’s where I look at every seam, make sure that they’re laying nicely together and just let the machine do the work. Sew across here. And again we’re just going to make these work. They’re actually really close. I mean as long as your quarter inch seam on the outside of your block is the same, it’s going to be really close. Alright I”m going to press this. I’m going to move this over here. And I’m just going to press this so it lays flat.
And now again, this is the way my brain works. My brain is going to see these things right here as the whites coming together so I’m going to pick up all of these and just sew them together with the whites together. And by that I mean they’re laying just like this with the white fabrics to the middle and I’m going to sew those together. So I’m going to pick up all four of those and just lay them, match them up. I’m going to make four little sides here. And I’m going to chain piece these. So I look at my blocks to make sure as they’re going under that presser foot they’re going the same direction. And I’m going to lay these, make sure they match up and sew the white. And by the same direction, what I mean is this one is white on top, color on the bottom, white on top, color on the bottom. And I’m going to do that to all four of these pieces. I see these patterns that occur and this is really kind of what happens for me and my brain. So here’s the next one. And I’m going to line that up, nest that up. And this one too. So put these white ones together, sew toward the nest, make sure the nest is lined, lined up with each other. Alright. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to take these, cut them apart. And then I’m going to press them open. And then we’ll put them back in the block. And I do this every step along the way to make sure that my block is forming up just like I want it to. So again I’m just going to iron these open so they’re nice and flat. And then I’m going to set them back in.
Now the next pattern that I’ve noticed is, wait, they’re going to go this way. The white to the middle. This is why I have to do pattern thing because I get turned around so easily. So white to the middle, white to the middle just like this. Now it has made a square around my pinwheel. And you’ll notice all my four corners are pointing in. I’m actually going to swap these two because I’ve got lots of blue, lots of orange. Everything else looks pretty good to me. And so now what I can do is I’m going to sew this row, these two to these. Sew these two big pieces to my center pinwheel and then sew this row. And put them all together. By doing that you’re going to get a block that looks just like this. Just like this.
Now I decided because of these little blocks that come together right there I wanted to finish that peak on the top. This peak right here, see I just sewed two colors together, two colors together, two colors together, and put this whole row along the top. This one right here, because these whites were here, this one I set in backwards. Well it’s not really backwards, it’s white first because it makes this border again right here. And so adding this border made these hearts appear, these happy little hearts. I was so excited when I saw these little hearts appearing around the pinwheels and I didn’t even know that was going to happen. And so that was a really fun little thing that happened. I hope you get a chance to watch this video. It’s on YouTube and Facebook. It’s the Birthday Bash video Sew Off. And it’s just so much fun. And I hope you give this project a try and make your own happy hearts. And we hope you enjoyed this tutorial from the Missouri Star Quilt Company.