The first step in making a patchwork quilt is to cut pieces of fabric into the geometric shapes that you’ll later piece together to form blocks.
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Quilt-Cutting Guidelines
To cut pieces as precisely as possible, it’s important to follow a few guidelines for setting up and cutting your fabric:
- Always square the fabric so that its grain is even with the grid lines on the mat and beneath the rulers.
- If you’re right-handed, keep the extra fabric to the right of the cut you’re going to make. If you’re left-handed, keep the extra fabric to the left of the cut.
- Always roll the rotary cutter away from you, keeping the blade flush against the straight edge of your ruler or template.
- Always factor in the seam allowance when cutting your shapes to your desired width.
- Lay multiple layers of fabric one over the other and cut them all at once to ensure identical sizes.
Cut Fabric Strips
Along with producing strips of fabric, strips can be cut further to form many other geometric shapes, such as squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, and parallelograms, for use in quilting designs.
- Place the fabric on the cutting mat so that its length is aligned with the base of the mat. You want to be cutting across the width.
- Place the rotary cutting ruler over the fabric, using the clear plastic ruler to measure the desired width of fabric (the fabric you’re cutting off should be under the ruler).
- Cut one fabric strip.
- Move the straight edge to the right (or left, if left-handed), repositioning the edge to measure another equally-sized strip. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you’ve cut all the strips you need.
Cut Squares and Rectangles
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- Orient the cut strip so that it’s aligned horizontally with the markings on the mat. You can layer strips one on top of another if you’d like to cut more than one at a time into identical shapes. Make sure they’re perfectly aligned when layered.
- Place the ruler over the fabric strip at the desired width (including seam allowance).
- Cut one square or rectangle.
- Move the straight edge to the right (or left, if left-handed). Repeat step 3 until all squares or rectangles have been cut.
A Time-Saving Trick: Sew Seams Before Cutting
For quilt designs in which you have repeating sequences of squares or rectangles, you may be better off piecing together strips before you cut them into squares or rectangles. For instance, in the sample design, the white, light blue, and dark blue blocks contain two sequences of light blue, white, dark blue.
If you cut the strips into squares before piecing them together, you have to sew four seams to piece the squares in the first and third rows of the block. But if you pieced the strips first, you could sew just two seams. Then, you could cut the pieced-together strips into already-pieced groups of three squares.
Cut Half-Square Triangles
The most commonly used triangles in quilting are half-square triangles—the triangles created when you cut a square along its diagonal. To provide these triangles with the proper 1/4″ seam allowance, the original square from which they’re cut must be 7/8″ larger than the short edges of the finished triangle. For instance, if you wanted triangles that, in the finished quilt, had short sides of 4″, then the square from which they were cut would have to be 4 7/8″.
- Align the straight edge diagonally across the square, making sure the corners are perfectly bisected.
- Cut the square in half with the rotary cutter.
Cut Diamonds and Parallelograms
You can create diamonds by making two parallel cuts at an angle of 45° to the horizontal edges of a strip. You can make parallelograms if the cuts are at an angle of 60°. The rotary cutting ruler has angle markings that you can line up against the edge of the fabric to ensure that you’re cutting at either 45° or 60°—whichever angle your pattern calls for.
- Lay the rotary cutting ruler across the fabric strip.
- Use the ruler’s angle measurement guide to align the ruler so that it’s at a 45° or 60° angle from the bottom edge of the fabric strip.
- Cut the strip along the desired angle.
- To repeat, move the rotary cutting ruler to the side, aligning the rotary cutting ruler the width of the desired piece away from the cut edge, plus 1/2″ for the seam allowance.
