Tender Heart Quilt Tutorial

with
Jenny Doan

Tender Heart Quilt Tutorial

Quilt Size: 72" x 77"
Jenny Doan demonstrates how to make a sweet heart quilt out of 2.5 inch strips of precut fabric (jelly rolls). We used Kona Cotton - Blushing Bouquet Roll Up by Robert Kaufman Fabrics for Robert Kaufman. Learn how to quilt with strip sets, snowball corners, and add sashing and cornerstones 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. Let’s take a look at this quilt behind me. This is our Heart quilt. We’ve made it with lots of strips. It has some cute sashing in it and some cornerstones as well. And it just makes a really fun great quilt. Now as quilters a lot of times in our lives we are called upon to make quilts in circumstances that are less than wonderful. And we often make a heart quilt. And we send those hearts with our support and all of our love. And today I want to show you an easy way to make a heart quilt. There’s lots of different ways to do it and I just want to show you my way. I also want you to hang on because at the end I’m going to show you a whole bunch of different ways to use this same method to make different types of hearts for the people that you love in your life.

So to make this quilt what you’re going to need is one roll of 2 ½ inch strips. We’ve used Blushing Bouquet for Kona for Robert Kaufman. And you’re also going to need 2 ¼ yards of your background fabric. And that’s these squares here and also this first border. For your sashing strips you’re going to need 1 ½ yards for your sashing. Your outer border is a six inch border and you’re going to need a yard and a half for that. So that’s all your supplies and now let’s get to it.

So what we’re going to do first is you’re going to open up your roll and we’re going to divide these up, lights and darks, lights and darks because we want some contrast in our hearts. And so we’re going to sew our strips together four of them in a row. And you can see right here I’ve got four strips sewn together. And I have dark, light, dark, light. You know just Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I’ve got a really fun project for you today. Let’s take a look at this quilt behind me. This is our Heart quilt. We’ve made it with lots of strips. It has some cute sashing in it and some cornerstones as well. And it just makes a really fun great quilt. Nosomething to give it some contrast. And, and I’ve pressed all my seams going one direction. So I have actually two sets here. Two different sets like this. We chose to mix ours up. You can keep it the same. Again at the end I’m going to show you a whole bunch of different ways to do things. But we’re going to mix ours up. So what I did with this was, we’re going to take our strip set once we get them all sewn together. And it’s just a quarter of an inch seam right down the side. One thing to remember when you sew strips is it’s always good to go this way and then that way, then this way and that way. And that will keep your strip set from bowing.

Alright so what we’re going to do now is we are going to cut these strip sets into five inch pieces. So I’m going to trim up this outer edge right here and make sure it’s real nice and straight. Alright so once you have a nice straight edge you can just lay your, your five inch ruler right along the edge and make a cut. And you’re going to do that to your whole set, just like this. Alright so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our background fabric and we are going to cut some five inch squares. You are going to need cut two for every block and some 2 ½ inch squares, you’re going to need four for every heart. So we’re going to take our two pieces like this. And we have, those are our two halves, we have to make them look heart shaped. The easiest way to do that is on the top of our blocks we’re going to put a 2 ½ inch square here and a 2 ½ inch square here like this. And we’re going to sew across and down just like this. So you might want to put a little, take your heart and finger press a line or draw your line side to side so that you can see that you’re going to sew up and then down on the tops of your block. Once you’ve done a few of these, you see I put them right on there without even finger pressing a line. That’s because I’ve made a few of things and by the time you get to end of making them you’re pretty good at eyeballing corner to corner. And so I’ll just go ahead and do that. I almost even forgot to mention about our little line. So we’re going to do this at the top of both of ours, both of our five inch pieces. And just remember you’re going to go up and down like a little mountain at the top of your block.

Alright so let’s go to the sewing machine and take care of that. Alright now we’re just going to lay this, put it right on the point. So sometimes, even when you fold or press the line, it doesn’t get right to the point, just go ahead and make sure you start right right at the point. We’re going to go up to the end and I’m going to pause and make sure that my, my square is on the other side. I’m lining it up with the outside edge and I’m coming down the other side. So just like a little mountain. And we’re going to do the same thing to the other one as well. And again I’m just lining it up on the edge, that’s the important part, line it up on the edge. Start at your point and come straight across. And I get right to the end, make sure my other square is still on there straight. Mine shifted a little bit. You can put a pin in yours and save you that bit of time. And we’ve now made the top half of our block because when we cut these off, we’re just going to trim these off, a quarter of an inch about. That was a little bit closer than a quarter. That was a little bit fatter. As long as we trim them good we’re good to go. Just don’t cut your thread, don’t cut into your seam. And then we’re going to press these back. So I’m going to move these thing so I can press them back and just roll them back like this. And do that on either side of your block.

So there’s the top part of our heart right there. And now we have to make this bottom part. To do that we’re going to take our five inch square and we are going to press a line. And we, now this part you have to be careful of because they have to point the right direction. It won’t look like a heart if it doesn’t come into the middle like this. So your two pieces are going to go on here opposite direction. We’re going to put them right on here like this and we are going to sew on the line, right on top of that line coming down here. Now when we sew on top of the line this piece out here, this is a lot of waste. It’s actually too much waste for me. So I’m going to sew on the line, come back and sew about a half an inch away from that line. And this is going to give me another little block that I used in this little project over here that I’ll show you how to do as well. So let’s go over to the sewing machine and we’re going to sew on the line on these. So right on the line. And when I get down here to the end. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to flip this around and come to the outside of my block. And you know I don’t draw the line, I don’t measure it. I just sew about a half an inch so I have enough, enough space to cut between. That’s what you’re looking for, enough space to cut between. And you don’t want your seam too narrow because your seam could pull apart and you don’t want that. So the same thing on this one. I’m just going to sew right on the line. When I get out here to the edge I’m going to flip it around and come back and sew about a half an inch over. Now if you’re pretty exact on your, on where you sew it together. Like I always eyeball my presser foot so that it’s just pretty, you know, just oh about ⅛ or 1/16 of an inch from that line then your blocks will come out the same size to square these little blocks but that’s a whole other project.

Alright so right here, you can see, I have my two lines sewn, I’m just going to cut right in between them. Just like this. And then we’re going to press these open for our heart right here. And I’ll show you what we’re going to do with those in a minute. Alright so now we’re pressing these open. Set your seam, roll it back. Make sure there’s no pleats or folds in there. That one wanted to fold up. Alright so now look at this. We have our little heart. And we’re going to be able to just take this and sew this together just like this. Now with my seams I’ve pressed all of my seams going one direction. The next row I pressed them all going the other direction. So my seams on my, my little strips they’re going to line up perfectly. And I’m going to be able to match them. And you kind of want to do that on something like this unless you do it real scrappy. So I’m going to lay this on here, get a few stitches going. And then I”m just going to watch and make sure that my seams are lining up as I come to them. It’s so interesting how your seams will be like all the same size but some of them feel more narrow, some of them feel wider. You just do the best you can and sew right down that middle. And that gives you your heart block. You know finished is better than perfect and I’ve never given a quilt to anybody where they’ve given it back and told me, if I could get that a little straighter I’ll take that quilt. No they don’t care. They just, they just do it. They just like it. So I’m just going to press that, make that go the way I want to. And here is our heart block.

So once you get your block all done we’re ready to set it into the quilt. Now on our quilt right here we’ve sashed it. We wanted each heart to be defined with a sashing. And so you measure the height of your block and that’s the size your side sashing is. So you can see on ours we’ve put ours heart, sash, heart, sash, heart, sash. Now we have five across here and six rows. For your next sashing you measure across the bottom of your block. And you’re going to put a sash in that is that size. I have a bigger on over here. And we wanted our cornerstone to kind of pop and so we used a white because our sashing was pink we used a white cornerstone. So then you’re going to put this row together just like this. And again, this row right here is a separate row that you’re going to sew together. You’re going to sew these little blocks to these little strips, these sashing strips. And so you’re going to have a row and then a sashing row, a block row, a sashing row, block row, sashing row. Just like that. And that’s going to make your whole quilt. You’re then going to add your inner and outer borders and your quilt is going to be done and ready to give to somebody that you love.

So now I want to show you some fun things to do. Because this is made from two pieces, we’ve got our two, two pieces like this, even though we did ours with strips you can do them with anything. Remember all you’re doing is taking your, putting your two corners on here and your one corner down here on the bottom. So here we’ve got, I’ve got some made here. This is where our strips match up. So it’s the same two pieces but our strips match going across, a little bit different look. Here it is plain, two plain pieces of fabric right here. Here we’ve got a pink and a red, two different colors. We’ve got a four patch. So four different squares but doing the same thing, the two squares on the top and the two squares on the bottom. And then we’ve also got a scrappy one right here. Now your block is going to change size. The more seams you have the different size your block is going to be. So for your sashings and things like that you want to make sure you measure the width of your block and the length of your block for your sashings.


So now one more thing, we have these awesome little pieces that we’ve cut off out here. Let me show you how we did this project right over here by me. So I’m going to press these two open. You know we never want to waste if we can, if we can help it. So we try to save all of our little pieces. And for our little pieces out here, once you realize, once you, once you cut these off, I mean these are mine cut off. Obviously mine are a little different size so you’re going to have to square them up. But this is a half square triangle. So I want you to think about half square triangles. Anything that we do with half square triangles you can do with these blocks. So you could make a pinwheel. Look at this. Oops, one more turn, one more turn, here we go. You could make a pinwheel. You could make a, you could make a flying geese block. You could make a chevron block. Anything we can do with a half square triangle you can now do with these. We decided to make these flying geese blocks. So we have a row going this way and a row going this way and a row going this way. And it just makes a cute little runner. A little extra something and something to do with your extra little corner blocks so there’s no waste at all. So we hope that you enjoyed this tutorial on our heart quilt. We’re calling it Tender Hearts, from the MSQC.

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