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Bunny Sawtooth Star Quilt Block and Baby Quilt Tutorial
Today I’m going to show you how to make a sawtooth star quilt block featuring an applique bunny. I’ll include a link to the bunny template that you can download for free for your personal sewing projects. This tutorial is a two parter: first, I’ll teach you how to create the sawtooth star quilt block. Second, I’ll teach you how to assemble 6 oversized blocks into a quick and easy baby quilt with sashing and corner stones. The Sawtooth Star is a traditional quilt block that’s easy to assemble with half square triangle units (HSTs). It’s composed of 3 different elements: 1 large central square 4 corner squares 8 half…
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How Much Fabric Do I Need To Buy for Cutting Out Rectangles?
I’m trying something new on the blog. I get a lot of questions from readers that I answer privately, but they are often very similar to each other. I’m going to start answering questions that are not private in nature publicly on the blog so that everyone can learn from the answers. Let’s share the wealth! Have a question? Come ask me over on my contact page. Today’s question comes from DJ: HELP!!!! how much fabric would I need for 20 squares that measure 15″ x 16 1/2″? THANK YOU How Much Fabric Do I Need to Buy to Cut These Rectangles? The way I calculate this is very similar to the…
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How to Sew a Heart Mug Rug Quilting Tutorial
In this tutorial, I’m going to teach you how to make this super cute heart mug rug. I’ve made mine in red, white and pinks, giving off a major Valentine’s Day vibe, but you could easily swap up the colours for a totally different look all year round. You can watch my video tutorial or read the transcript below. I’ve included a few photos for reference but the main tutorial is on the video portion of this posting. How to Sew a Heart Mug Rug – Video Tutorial: This is a great project to use up fabric scraps. You’ll need three fabric prints in total: one dark for the background and…
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What Tools Do You Need to Start Quilting?
Quilting is one of my all time favourite crafty activities. I’m always trying to get my friends started on quilting (with a few successful recruits, hooray!). What do you need to get started quilting? You don’t really need much to get started. People have been quilting long before fancy sewing machines have existed. You can cut patches out of fabric with a standard pair of scissors, and sew together by hand with a needle and thread. So the bare-bones list would be: fabric, scissors, needle, thread, and batting. But I’ll be honest: I hate hand sewing, and cutting out fabric patches with scissors would drive me crazy because it is…
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Free Motion Quilting Sampler – Winter Mini Quilt
I’m hoping this mini quilt is the first of many free motion quilting projects that I’ll be sharing on Craftcore. This is brand new territory, so there’s plenty of improvements to be made. I’ve wanted to try free motion quilting for a while, but my sewing machines didn’t have an easy way to lower the feed dogs to stop the fabric from being pulled. When I picked up a retro White sewing machine with easy-to-drop feed dogs, I decided it was time to order a darning foot to take the plunge. First, let’s start with some ugly attempts. Figure 1: this deer covered in a stitchy mess. To practice, I…
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Fidget Quilt Week 3 Block
My fidget quilt challenge continues! Week 3’s challenge is to make a quilt block that features three handmade textures. You can’t just sew on some fun fur and call it a day; you need to actually manipulate your materials into a texture. The great thing about creating texture is that you don’t have to be perfect. Any imperfections can contribute to the organic feeling. This is what I came up with for my block this week: As you can see, I’ve gone with a flag motif. Do you watch The Big Bang Theory? This is my ode to “Fun with Flags.” Texture 1: Woven Yarn-Bomb Heart Flag. I cut out a…
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How to Make a Tall & Skinny Pinwheel Tote Bag
Once upon a time I was a newbie quilter who made her first ever set of pinwheels out of adorable black and red fabric. The pinwheels were adorable in theory, but the mismatched points were glaringly unsightly. Enter the humble button, which saved my first attempts from being seam ripped or ignored and gave them new life. There, that’s much better! I made these pinwheels as a test, then set them aside. I eventually came across them again and decided to repurpose them into a small tote bag to use while travelling on the train. I wanted to be able to put my lunch at the base of the bag…
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McCall’s Patterns Sewing Themed Quilt
The quilt featured on this page utilizes pink fabrics from a variety of collections, but the focal fabrics are pulled from the McCall’s themed fabric collection. These fabric is no longer being produced, but you can check out the archive on the Windham Fabrics page to track them down. The main fabrics feature vintage illustrations as used on old sewing patterns. Back in 2012, I created a tutorial so that you can create your own version of this quilt. I fell in love with the vintage-style illustrations on this fabric line and just had to have it. I fussy cut the fabrics so that I could feature as many of the various girls as possible on the…
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Quilting Basics: Chain Piecing for Quick Quilting
When I learned about chain piecing, my quilting life changed for the better. I had already made several quilts without chain piecing when my mother asked if I was using this method. I had no idea this was a thing! I tried it out, and now I chain piece basically anything that requires the same repetitive sewing over and over. What are the advantages of chain piecing? It’s quick because you don’t have to start and stop your machine as much. You waste less thread since you don’t have a long thread tail at the start and stop of each of your blocks. Additionally, you can leave your pieces joined…
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Quilting Basics: HST and QST Printable Cutting Guide
Two building blocks of quilt patterns are the HST unit and the QST unit: the half square triangle and the quarter square triangle. Once you have this skill in your arsenal, the world of quilting opens wide! The method I will show you in this tutorial will create two units at once rather than one at a time. The process goes a lot faster with minimal extra steps, plus there’s less risk of the triangles getting stretched out due to bias cutting. This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a little commission at no extra cost to you if you make…
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Repositionable Quilt Planning: Save an Abandoned Sewing Project
I’ve been working on one particular quilt for just over a year ago now – a brightly coloured 80″x80″ quilt with “Monkey Wrench” quilt pattern blocks in bright blue, orange, green and pink. I keep getting distracted from this project by other projects, so I’ve finally decided that I just need to force myself through the rest of the blocks to finish this once and for all. No more distractions! #quilting I’ve made dozens of blocks in the same pattern for the quilt I’m working on, but I think this is my favourite colour combination yet! A photo posted by @pangepange on May 10, 2015 at 1:17pm PDT This is…
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How to Make a Chevron Quilt from Start to Finish
If you have never quilted, this tutorial to create a small chevron tabletop quilt will be perfect for you. This project is small but will give you the skills you need to make a basic quilt with half square triangle (HST) blocks. You’ll learn how to do the following: cut out your fabrics assemble half square triangle (HST) unit blocks two at a time assemble the HST units into a chevron pattern assemble your quilt sandwich: quilt top, batting, and backing quilt the sandwich square up your quilt create binding from strips of fabric attach the binding to the quilt with mitred corners and hidden ends It looks like a…
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Oversized Punctuation as Applique Design
Punctuation serves an invaluable duty, creating clarity in our sentences. The simple comma is all that separates the heartwarming sentence, “Let’s eat, grandma!” from the macabre, “Let’s eat grandma.” In this quilt project, I used the over-sized punctuation mark as an applique design element. Take a look: I made this quilt in February 2010, and it is still my go-to comfy quilt even after making several after this one. (It’s been through the wash quite a bit, so it has that lovely soft quality now.) To make the comma shapes, I went into Photoshop and created an oversized comma to print out. I traced them onto a product called Steam-a-Seam…
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Easy Strip and Block Throw Quilt Top
This simple throw quilt can be made easily using simple squares, rectangles, and strips sewn together into rows. I used pink fabric with vintage McCalls patterns printed on it and coordinated it with fabrics from my stash that matched. Here is the completed quilt alongside the template of the quilt layout I created in Word. The completed quilt will measure 32″x43.75″ if you follow the instructions to a tee. (Quilt pictured actually measures 30.5″x43.75 due to shortage of fabric.) Download and print out the Craftcore Strip and Block Quilt Template. After picking out all the fabrics I want to use in a quilt, I use a paper template such as…
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