Jenny's Doll Quilt Tutorial

with
Jenny Doan

Jenny's Doll Quilt Tutorial

Quilt Size: 26 " x 26"
Jenny demonstrates how to make a replica of her own childhood doll quilt using 5 inch squares of precut fabric (charm packs). She used a sweet vintage charm pack called Sugar Sack by Whistler Studios for Windham Fabrics. Learn how to square your half square triangles quickly using Clearly Perfect Slotted Trimmersby Kari Carr for New Leaf Stitches in this free quilting tutorial.
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video transcript

Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I’ve got a really fun project for you today. Today we’re taking a walk down memory lane and showing you a little piece of my past. When I was five years old my mom had a lady at church, her name was Perry White, make this quilt for me. And I’ve treasured it my whole life. I actually called my mom to ask her some questions about it, what she remembered and everything. And she said well I don’t remember you playing with it very much because you were such a tomboy. But my little sister right away remembered wrapping her dolls in it. And I guess I was just a really good sharer. I had this red one. My sister had a little green one. I don’t know what happened to the green one. But I have cherished this my whole life. Now it’s made with these little set in diamonds. So I decided to make it easier so that we could show you how to do it on a little bit easier fashion. You know how my brain does that. So to make this quilt what you’re going to need are 12 five inch squares. And so if you have a charm pack laying around it’s just the perfect project for that. This is a line called Suga Stack. And it’s by Whistler’s Studios for Windham Fabrics. And you know I waited a while for just the right line. And I just felt that this was the one where I could recreate it best. Here’s my recreated version over here. And you can see that I’ve put the light sashing in and kept my stars the same. And these stars have the look of the diamond without the work or the set in seams. So it’s fun quick and easy to make. Obviously you can make it bigger if you just make more stars and do it. But I kind of wanted to create it exactly the same.


So to make these stars what you’re going to do is you’re going to take your five inch squares. Now I actually used my background fabric on this is I used a half a yard of red. And that’s this stuff right here. That’s for all this. And I actually, you know when I get fabric to make tutorials with I don’t get a ton of fabric so I like to use every single bit of it. And as we get along a little bit I’ll show you how much I used every single little bit it. But you’re going to need two five inch squares of background fabric. And then you’re going to need a square of each color to go with that background fabric like this. And then one more set where they sew together. So we’re going to sew this one to this one. And what we’re doing is we’re sewing all the way around the outside edge and this one to this one. So you sew one of each color to the background fabric. And then those two colors together. So we’re going to do all three of those right here and we’re just going to sew a quarter of an inch all the way around all of these and then cut them into fourths to make some half square triangles.


So I’m just going whiz through these here. And people always say do you stop and pivot or do you sew right off the end. And I’m like, it just depends how fast I’m going. There’s no, there’s no right or wrong way to do that. Alright so here’s this one. Now we’re going to do this one. There we go. Alright so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our charms and we’re going to cut them all diagonally both directions. So this way and this way. And we’re going to do this to all three pieces.So I”m going to set these over here. And this is going to make a whole quarter of your star. So you’re going to do this to make the star you’re going to do this four times. And then we’ve got this one right here. Now see a lot of times this will happen, I don’t know if you can see this, it’s hard to see and it’s tiny. But there’s a little tiny fold right there. But that doesn’t matter because you’re going to cut right through it. So don’t worry if that happens. You know if you get a little pleat at the corner don’t worry because we’re going to cut right through that. Alright so once you get all your little half square triangles cut like that then we’re going to square them. And we’re going to square them to three inches. And so I”m going to lay my little ruler right on my sew line. Sew line to the sew line and trim these. And I’m going to trim all of these at three inches all the different sizes as well. I mean all the different, all three of these little sets that I’ve made are all going to be trimmed to three inches. Alright so I’ve got my last one done. And I wanted to mention this is the Clearly Perfect slotted trimmer. And again you’ll line your little stitch line, their stitch line up with your stitch line right there and I mean it just makes perfect, such an easy way to cut half square triangles. And again if you want to cut off your dog ears they have these little slots where you just come in and trim them off. And the little dog ears are just gone.


Alright so now we’re going to iron all these open. And I’m going to iron, put my dark fabric on the top. And you should have four where these are together like this, four of each one. So we have four where the two printed fabrics are together. And then we should have four where we have our one fabric with the background. And I”m actually going to use my background as my dark. So I”m going to re-iron this one right here. I”m just going to fold him in half and and iron him back down. And then flip him over and iron so that my background is the dark. And the same on these red ones or this one with the blue on it.


So basically this is an eight point star and it just goes together so slick this way. Let me show you how we work this. And so you’re actually going to do this eight times, you know, so that there’s. I’m sorry not eight times. Four times because each one of these is going to make a quarter, a quadrant. And you can see I’ve got my other ones over here already done. This is our block we’re looking for so let me show you how to put these together. First you’re going to need are four three inch blocks. And that goes one on each corner. And what I do is I put them in a pile like this so that I can take them right to the sewing machine and put them all together. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to match these up so that they’re all laying the exact direction they go. I’ve got to get this, I’ve got to turn these so I can see them. This is one of those where all that angley challenged comes into play. Alright so we’re going to put these down like this. So the half square triangles go in that way. These are going to come along to make the other part of this star point right here. See how these are going to line up like this. These are then are going to line up like this and then you put your corner in.


So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take all four of these piles just like this and set them right next to my sewing machine. And I”m going to go through so when you make one of these, one of these corners, you’re going to sew through all these blocks and it makes all the corners for all four stars. So when you get done, you know out of your, out of your few little charms this is going to make the corner of four blocks. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to sew these down, put them on here together like this and then sew these down. So this actually makes one star corner right here. But because of the way we’re doing it we’ll get four done and well you know you just have to do this four times and it makes these little eight point stars so fast. Alright so now I know that each two of these is going to be one quadrant. So I”m only cutting apart every other strip or every other piece like this. So I have two together in each one. And I’m just going to open these up like this, make sure my star points line up, put those right sides together and then I’ll be able to sew all of these together and I”ll have four little blocks, a whole quadrant done. Alright let’s go ahead and just do the rest of these. So if you were to make a bigger quilt you’d be making four sets of stars at a time. And you could actually scrap them all up but I just like that these matched and they went together. I felt like on the little quilt that, my doll quilt that was made, a lot of the same fabrics were in there and so I just wanted to, I just wanted it to be as close to that as I could get it. Some of those fabrics are worn clean through.


Alright so now let’s go press these. I’m going to clip them apart and then we’re going to go press these open. There we go. I probably should have done this, there we go. Alright so see now how I have these four quarters that are all the same. So now I’m going to bring in my other, my other star corners. And I’m going to find an arrangement that I like and, oh let’s see maybe we can we can swap. Nope I want to make sure that I’ve got enough, oh that’s better. So now I have a color and a lighter color kind of all the way around. So now what I’m going to do is I”m just going to take these two top ones and then these two bottom ones and sew them together. And that’s going to make my whole star. So again every time you make, you use your, your little charm pieces you’re going to make a whole quarter so it goes together really quick and all of a sudden you have this eight point star and it’s just done, done. Alrighty, now we’re just going to open this up and put this together. And it’s fun because again we have all these little blocks so that helps keep us right in line. You know we make sure each little seam matches up. And that makes sure our star is all going to match up and look really nice. Alright so let me sew this, or iron this together now, or iron this open. Sew this together, iron it together. Alright. And so here’s your star right here.


Now very easily you can go ahead and sew these other four pieces together and you’ll have four of these in a heartbeat. And we’re just going to put them together like this. So you’re going to measure the width of your star right here and then cut your sashing to fit that. And we just put a sashing, you know a sashing in between here and here and then one long one in between here to make the quilt. And then kind of put a little border sashing around. Now you’ll notice on my quilt over here it’s got no border edge. And I love this, this one up here is bigger and this one is smaller. I just, I just love it.


So one of my favorite things when I find old quilts, one of my favorite things is when I see a piece of fabric that has a little seam in it because they have to sew two tiny pieces together to make the piece that was big enough and I actually had to do that because I had so little of this fabric and I used it in my background and my sashing and even my little binding strip, I actually had to just sew some of those pieces together. So let me see if I can find one here because, oh right here. And see this is where you know if you’re thrifty, you run out of something just think about what you can do because, because this, this just makes it really really doable, you know if you have two tiny pieces. So see right here, you can probably see it better on the back. See I took a seam right here before I cut that square I had to sew two tiny pieces together. And when you iron it and open it up and use it as a whole piece, it looks like a whole piece. And so if you run out of fabric ever and you need to, you know, you’ve just got to put one of those together you’ll be able to do that with by, by just making a little seam. When I see the old quilts with the little seam it just makes me realize how thrifty they were and how easy that would be for us as well.


So this has been a really fun walk down memory lane for me. I love this doll blanket obviously. It’s loved and worn and just worn through. It’s got a little flannel inside of it. Just really cute. And we hope enjoyed this tutorial on Jenny’s Doll Quilt from the MSQC.

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