Vintage Bouquet Quilt Tutorial

with
Jenny Doan

Vintage Bouquet Quilt Tutorial

Quilt Size: 71" x 85"
Jenny Doan demonstrates how to make a lovely flower quilt using 10 inch squares of precut fabric (layer cakes) and the Missouri Star Mini Orange Peel Template for 2.5" Squares. For this quick and easy project, Jenny chose A Blooming Bunch by Maureen McCormick for Moda Fabrics. Yes, you read that right! This gorgeous collection was designed by the actress who played Marcia Brady on the Brady Bunch. Maureen is a talented quilter with a real flair for design! This applique quilt is made easy with Heat n Bond fusible adhesive. Learn how to make big half square triangles in a flash and square them up with the Perfectly Slotted Trimmer or a regular square ruler.
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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 and it involves Maureen McCormick from the Brady Bunch. She’s now making her own fabric and it’s called The Blooming Bunch. And I love that she threw that bunch in there. And it’s just so darling and so vintage looking. So to make this quilt you’re going to need one packet of 10 inch squares and again we’ve used the Blooming Bunch. And you’re going to need a packet of background squares as well. And we have used navy but hang on until the end because I have a surprise for you. So we’ve used the navy for that. And if you want to cut your own squares, it’s about three yards. So don’t be afraid to do that as well. And you’re going to need some Heat N Bond. We used Heat N Bond lite, about 4 ½ yards. This first inner border out here is a 2 ½ inch border. That’s ¾ of a yard. Your outer border is six inches and that is a yard and a half. Your backing on this is going to be 5 ¼ yards. And the quilting pattern that we used on this is called Flutter By. And I love the little butterflies kind of going through the garden. It just looks really, really sweet. So this makes a quilt that is 71 by 85. So let me show you how to make this block because it’s really fun.


First we’re going to take a square of print like this and a square of solid. We’re going to lay these right on top of each other just like this. And we’re going to make sure that they’re lined up exactly. And then going to cut two inches off of two sides. So I’m going to lay my ruler right on the edge right here, just like this. And I’m going to move this out of the way. And I’m going to line this one here and cut. So two inches off of two pieces, off of two sides. And then what we’re going to do is we are going to make this into a half square triangle. So what we want to do is we want to take this and we’re going to draw a line corner to corner. And you want to use something that shows up. I happen to have a lighter sharpie here which shows up and we’re going to cut on that line so it’s not going to be any big deal to use it. But you can use a chalk pencil or anything. Or you could actually even draw your line on the other side. Now before you sew you want to make sure that these two are right sides together like this. And we are going to sew on both sides of this line, sew a quarter of an inch on both sides of this line.


And we’re going to go down here and we’re going to flip around and come down the other side. Alright. So once you get your block sewn we’re going to cut that corner to corner. So you’re going to lay your ruler right on that line. And we’re just going to cut it right along here. Alright now we’re going to square these. And two different ways to do it and I’m going to show you those ways. So I have my clearly perfect slotted trimmer. And you’ll notice this is a larger one. I like that she came out with a larger set. And we are going to lay this, our seam line on her seam line. Now there’s going to be very, very little waste. And I actually can’t see very well on the navy so I’m going to flip this over and I can see now this little sewing line much easier. And I’m going to run it up to 7 ½ just like that. Now you can see right here so little waste, so little waste. So we’re just going to trim this off and we’re just going to trim this off. And this is your waste on this right here. So that’s how you’re going to do it with the clearly perfect slotted trimmer. And it’s just going to be very little waste. We’ll press it to the dark side and this block will be ready to go and it’s ready for applique. So I’m going to set that over here.


Now the other one, I’m going to go ahead and press open and we’re going to show you how to square that with a regular square ruler. Most of us have a square. And so I’m going to again press it to the dark side. And then I have this ten inch ruler right here. And one of the things that’s hard for me with rulers when I’m squaring blocks is if they have a little half inch on there, you’ve got to watch that. So watch your ruler if you have a half inch on there because it could, you know, it could mess you up. And this one I’m laying my diagonal line right down the middle and I’m coming to the 7 ½. So here’s our seven and I’m at the 7 ½ line and you can see again very, very little waste which I love that. Alright. So these are now squared to 7 ½. They’re pressed and they’re ready to go.


And we’re going to now grab our little 2 inch pieces that we took off and we are going to iron those onto our Heat N Bond. Alright I’m going to do it on this side. And I’m going to cut a two inch strip and I’m going to iron it right onto my fabric. Now when I had a whole bunch of these going, I ironed a whole bunch of strips on all at once and so you can do that if you want to because we will actually use a couple of different, a couple of strips, actually I’m going to need a couple of strips to get all these on here. Alright. So here’s my second strip. Now let’s lay our fabric on here and I’m going to lay the navy on this one and the green on this one. And I’m going to need an additional little piece for my other one. And so what that means to me as I’m doing this is that if I had my bigger piece, my 4 ½ yard piece, I would actually, you know, cut the size of the strip. I would cut that whole strip and lay two on there. But I’m using a little remnant that I have and so it just means I’m going to need a little bit of extra. And so I’m going to put this on here. And I’m going to press this like this and be very careful not to get my iron on here because that stuff will get on the bottom of your iron and stick on there. So I’ve laid my Heat N Bond with the bumpy side up and pressed down. And it just doesn’t take very long. And then we have this piece on here. I’m going to press that on there. Now I just heard something that’s kind of really cool. I heard that if you get sticky stuff on the bottom of your iron, you can use a dryer sheet to get that off. So I actually think that’s a pretty good tip. I’m going to cut this piece off here. And then I’m going to iron this piece on here and add this other piece out here. Now it doesn’t matter if these are exactly, you know, if there’s a little space in between because what we’re looking for is we’re just looking to hold this petal onto the half square triangle while we’re doing it. So I’m just going to put these here and I’m going to press here. Alright.


So once you get all these pieces ironed on we are ready to trace our little template. And I have a little mini peel right here. And what you want to remember is that these are both my, these are my navy ones and these are my green ones. I’m going to trim this little end piece off right here. And you need to get six out of these. And so we have to be kind of careful. It’s pretty easy to do but I laid them side by side like this and just traced around it this way. And so you get one, two, three pretty easily on these. This is the small piece. So you won’t have any trouble getting that on the large piece. And I have some traced over here and ready to go so I can show you the next step. And so right here I have this block that is sewn and ready to be cut. And again we’ll just do the same thing that we did on it and trim it, cut it and then square it up so that it’s ready to go. This just takes a few minutes and then I’ll show you how we put on those petals. You might be tempted, because it’s such little waste, you might be tempted to skip this part. And you can but whenever you square a block it just makes it go together so much nicer. So I’m just laying this on here on my seam line. And this one is perfect, I mean just perfect. Alright.


So now, again I’m going to press these open with my dark, press to the dark side. So my dark is on the top, my seam lays into the dark side. Then we have these petals here that we’re ready to put on. And we’re going to put three onto the navy like this, just like that. So now we put the navy ones on right here and I’m going to put three of those on like this. Now this, there’s a little trick to this and I want to show you. So I tend to just roll the edge of my paper to get that off. And whenever you have a point, I’m folding it in like this and then that piece will just pop out like that. And so again, fold it in, just fold it in a little bit and see how it just pops right back and then you grab ahold of that and take that off. So again on this we’re just going to fold this up. It’s just going to pop off there. You can peel it and you’re ready to go. Now when you put these on, you can use any stitch you want. So let’s talk about that for a minute. You can use a tiny zig zag. You can use one of those tiny little applique stitch where it stitch, stitch, stitch and then goes over. You can even use a decorative stitch. On mine, if we can get a good shot of this. I used a tiny little zig zag on these. And over here you can see it a little better. And I actually used invisible thread. Now when I use invisible thread my bobbin stays the same. You know, on this one I kept it gray so that it would work with either color and then I used this invisible thread and sewed around it so I didn’t have to change my thread with every color. Because you really don’t want that to show. You want the block to be the star, not the stitching so you want the stitching to go back. Now I did find, on some of them, you’ll notice that you can really see this invisible thread on this navy. And so on some of them I switched over to the navy thread which actually hides a lot better. So I did half of them with the invisible up here and the other half with the navy and it just worked really, really well.


But when you put them on what you want to do, and I learned this trick from my granddaughter Aislyn. She put in the two middle petals like this. And then she put the one on the top like this. What this enables you to do and why this is key, and I’m going to put these over here the same way. So put your two side ones in and make sure they’re far enough away from the corner so you’re not going to catch them in the seam like this and put this one on. But what this enables you to do is if you start right over here stitching, you can stitch here, around here, around here, down there, over here and around there and never have to lift up your presser foot. That saves you a ton of time because what I was doing was I was going around here, then I’d, you know, cut my thread and I’d go around here and cut my thread and go around here. But as long as that one petal is in the middle, you know, you’re going to start right here or on one of these sides, you know, depending upon whether probably you’re right or left handed. And I’m going to go around here and then up through the middle and then over through here. And so that’s a super helpful tip for sewing these down. Alright.


So I have some things I want to talk to you about because these are half square triangles which means there are a zillion ways to set these. Now you can see from the quilt behind me, I put four of these together with my navies in the middle. So let’s look at that. And then I want to talk to you about what happens if. Now what happens if, I mean, this is a square in a square that is very easy to make with a half square triangle. What happens if we turn these and make a pinwheel? I mean what’s going to be different in that quilt if we do that? I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet. But look how fun this is. Look how fun this is. What happens if we do this like we originally had it where all the colors are turned to the middle and then we put the next row out here like this and so it frames it and it makes an around the world, so this keeps going and it gets bigger and bigger. What happens if you do that?


Well I had a couple of big what happens if thoughts occur to me. And I want to show you this quilt right here. Because this quilt is the exact same quilt only I used white as the background and I laid it together in a chevron because that’s another thing that we can do with our half square triangles. So Natalie, if you could just come help me hold this, that would be awesome because this is really pretty. Let me move this chair out of the way. So this is the chevron quilt. And you can see the chevron pattern runs along like this. And I used a white as a background and this is the softest, sweetest quilt but you can see these are exact same fabrics, exact same blocks just a different layout. But look what a difference it makes. Different background fabric. So I’ve got white on this one, we’ve got navy on this one. Look what a difference. Also I want to show you who doesn’t love a gingham. And look at the back on this quilt. It’s, the gingham back is so darling. It’s just so cute.


So this is a really fun quilt. It’s fun to play with because you have all the half square triangle options are open to you once you make these two squares. And I just love it bunches and bunches. So we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on the Vintage Bouquet from the MSQC.


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