How To Sew A Quilt Block

You set out to make a quilt.  Good for you!  You’ve cut your fabric, so the scariest part is behind you.  Now the real fun begins, you are ready to piece your quilt!  There are affiliate links in this post- what that means is that if you make a purchase through the link, it doesn’t cost you any more than the shopping you were planning to do anyway, but does mean that I earn a small commission.

Supplies you need:

Fabric

Thread

Sewing Machine

Piecing is the quilting word for sewing two pieces of fabric together.

Sometimes (like in this tutorial) you piece fabric strips together, and then sub cut into smaller units.  A unit describes small bits of fabric that have been sewn together that are no longer a single piece, but are not yet in their finished block form.  A block can be a single square of fabric, or it can be multiple units each made of up multiple pieces.

You didn’t know you were going to get a vocabulary lesson today, did you?  That’s okay, I didn’t know I was going to be giving a vocabulary lesson either.

Just like with cutting, precision and accuracy are required, although mistakes are easier to fix.  You should probably stop now and go buy a seam ripper, even the most experienced quilters have to take seams apart.  Sometimes it’s due to error, sometimes you just won’t like how two fabrics look together.  I prefer to use very fine point scissors for seam ripping, but there is a special tool that will do the job as well.

This tutorial assumes you have basic sewing machine knowledge like threading the needle, filling the bobbin, and setting the thread tension correctly.  I will add a troubleshooting post to the Quilting Basics page on the blog, but each machine is a little different, and you’ll likely get the most info from your owner’s manual.

Before jumping in to sewing together all that fabric you have already cut, start with a couple of scraps.

Unlike other sewing, quilting uses a ¼ inch seam.  After accurate cutting, you’ll get the most uniformity from your blocks by always using the exact same seam size.

Start by testing your ¼ inch seam.  Using two small scraps (length doesn’t matter, width is 2½ inches) sew them together, and press open.

2½ + 2½ = 5

5 – ¼ – ¼ = 4½

If your seam is an accurate ¼ inch, you would expect your finished piece to be 4½ inches wide.

You can see, lining my fabric up against the edge of foot on my machine, is slightly more than a ¼ inch seam allowance, because my finished unit is smaller than it should be, it’s only 4 1/4 inches.  That could cause problems later in the process.

On my machine (yours may be different, don’t take my word for it, do the test yourself) running the fabric through the machine, just inside the edge of the walking foot, is where my seam allowance is exactly ¼ inch, as my finished unit does measure at 4½ inches wide.

You don’t need to do this step every time you make a quilt, but give it a go once or twice in the beginning, to make sure you’ll have perfectly sized units and blocks later.

Now, you’re ready to start piecing your quilt!

Lining up two strips, right sides together (that’s the pretty printed side), stitch together along the length of the fabric.

Start with 4 strips.  Any color combo will work.

Sew #1 and #2, by placing #2 on top of #1.  Sew #3 and #4, by placing #4 on top of #3.  (Keep in mind, this photo shows the back of the fabric, because they’ve been placed right sides together.)

Fabric has a stretch to it, and always sewing from the same direction will lead to a curve in the finished strip.  By keeping track of which fabric was on top in this step (#2 and #4) will help keep track in future steps, which will prevent the curvature.

Stitch these strip sets together.  You do not need to stop and cut threads at the end of every strip, just keep sewing them through (this is called chain piecing) and trim the pairs apart later.  This will save time and thread.  Thread is not as expensive as fabric, but there is still no reason to waste it.  Or time.

Set the seam by ironing before opening the fabric, and then iron again, pressing the seam to one side.  Each quilt pattern will be different which side you press your seam towards.  In this quilt, where the blues and grays are similar colors, either direction would be fine, it just needs to always be the same, so that corners will match up easily in a later step.

In the blocks seen later in this quilt (my next post), where blues and grays are paired with white, I’ll iron towards the darker color, so it doesn’t show through the white.

Now it’s time to sew the two pairs, into one big strip that is 4 fabrics wide.  Because #2 was on the top when it was sewn, and because #3 was on the bottom when it was sewn, you want to do it that way again.  This changes up the direction you are sewing from (you’ll have to turn it 180* to get #2 on the right for stitching) which mediates the curve problem.

For these 4 strips, it was easy to keep track of what I was doing, because I was taking pictures as I went for the blog, and could refer back to which fabric had been on the stop.   For this quilt I have 99 strips, I’m not taking photos of all of them.   So how do I keep track of which fabric was on top?

I iron my seam towards that fabric that was on top when stitched.  That way I keep it consistent, and can piece strip set after strip set for hours on end, iron them all at the same time, and then move them around finding fabric combinations that I like, and still keep track of which fabric should be on top when sewing the pairs into fours.

So you’ve now got strip sets that are 4 fabrics wide, that should measure 8½ inches wide.  All seams have been ironed, so this strip set is as flat and easy to work with as a single piece of fabric.  Sub cut units that are 2½ inches.

I use the vertical measurement markers on the ruler to line up the cut that I want, and the horizontal measurement markers on the ruler to line up with the seams.  By checking myself twice before cutting, I’m ensuring that all corner points will match up in the next step.

Yes, that ruler is upside down.  It doesn’t really matter at this point, since the measurement I’m using is 2 1/2 inches from the edge, not from the top or bottom.  But, it still doesn’t look awesome for a photograph for the blog.  I’ll file that away for next time I’m taking pictures.

Pull together 4 separate units to make the 16-patch block.

Again, #2 will be sewn on top of #1 and #4 on top of #3, just like in the previous step.

Match the seams and pin in place, to make all the seams line up into perfect squares within the block.

Sew, set the seam, press the seam and you’ve got two new units that now measure 4½ by 8½.

Again, #2 will be on top of #3, and all seams should be matched up and pinned.

Sew, set the seam, press the seam and now you’ve got a finished block that should measure 8½ by 8½.

Woo hoo!  You did it!  Now make 98 more.  Oh, wait, that last direction is for me.

Really though, now that you have this skill, the sky is the limit!  My basics posts won’t contain step by step instructions of any one pattern, but what you have learned here can be applied to any quilt block pattern.  I do have several tutorials on my blog that do have step by step pattern instructions.

Once you’ve got blocks, use a quarter inch seam to sew them into rows, and then to sew the rows into a quilt top.  Add borders if you want, don’t if you don’t.  Just pin everything well, especially any time two seams are meeting, and you can make a quilt!

I’m making a queen size quilt that needs 99 of these blocks, as well as 44 blocks made of half square triangles.

Many blocks are made of triangles, especially half square triangles, and if you can make this block, you can make the next too.  You can do this!  Take it one step at a time, and quilting is not difficult.