5 WAYS TO USE UGLY FABRIC ***FREE QUILT PATTERN***

When we start

quilt

ing we want

fabric

and we want a lot of it and we want it as fast as we can accumulate it, but then as our skills improve and we experiment with

quilt

pattern

and color, we can look at some purchases and wonder what we are thinking. Today I have five strategies to help you deal with

ugly

fabric

s and stick around until the end when I have a quick and easy quilt

pattern

, so stay with me and I'll show you how to do it. Hi, I'm Karen Brown, I just made it, quilts, if you're new to my channel, I give you tips, tricks and strategies to help you make the quilt you want to make and one of the best compliments you can give me is to hit the subscribe button that appears below, sooner or later.

We all have

ugly

fabrics, some are given to us, some are in fabric bundles with other fabrics we love and some we just grow to a level that now beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sometimes you just realize it's outside from your color zone or you no longer like the pattern or you have simply matured as a quilter you found your rhythm you found your style this fabric is no longer appropriate for the type of quilting you like to do the good news is that there are many places and many

ways

in which you can use ugly fabrics at this time something very current is making masks and medical caps.

I'm going to use a ton of fabric that the patterns are too big to use in my quilting. I don't like pink. I don't like flowers and find the scale of this print to be too large to quilt with, so I often use these fabrics to make bags, whether they are grocery bags, shoe bags or gift bags. I'm sure you have many other places you can use. them too, an important part of binding is having a strategy for making the block, so your pattern may say that from fabric A to fabric B to fabric C, you may find that after making the block your block is small and needs to adjust its room. inch mark or it is square or you may see an easier way to do it or find some aspect of the block construction quite complicated.

I don't make many curbs and can't lose practice easily, so I al

ways

make a couple of practice pieces and it's much better to make these mistakes and find the problems before cutting the good fabric. I have a stack of fabrics in my stash just for this purpose. You can also destroy this fabric with leftover batting to make practice pieces for

free

. For motion quilting or trying specialty stitches or specialty threads, we have many places where we need fabric that will never or rarely be seen. If the fabric is the color of a quilt you are making, you can cut it out and use it on the back of the quilt.

I love this emu fabric in both of these color combinations, but I didn't like the third way, so I hid it in the inside of my retirement bag and I also hid it inside a wall. I'm quilting this block and making a pillow out of it, no one will see the other side of this, so I'm using an ugly fabric here. I think it was Bonnie Hunter who said that if you don't like a fabric, just ask her to cut it small enough. cut the fabric into five inch strips if you don't like it yet cut it in half or into two and a half inch strips if you don't like it yet cut it into two and a half inch blocks you can use all of these and Sample Scrap Blocks if you haven't seen my videos on scrap sample blocks and scrap string blocks, I'll link to them in the notes below.

Many subscribers asked me about the quilt pattern for this ugly quilt and in my family. Also known as the hospital, the quilt block can be made in a variety of sizes, but for this quilt we are going to make a finished twelve inch quilt and we will make twelve blocks, three columns for four rooms for a total. out of twelve and you will need twelve fabrics, the quilt will end up being 36 by 48 inches, which is a good round size quilt. Alternatively, we can make a five row column quilt, which means you need 20 fabrics and this quilt will be finished at 48 inches by 60 inches. so I'm making the pile of fabrics.

I'm lining up my fabrics along the selvedge and in this bottom corner I'm alternating them in light and dark squares along the selvedge and then I cut a 14 inch square when I have a 14 inch stack. Make a diagonal cut on the left side of the block, so I take the top right piece and place it on the bottom, then I make pairs of the top two and as you line them up, they're not going to match up. Perfect there, there will just be a little bit of overlap on both sides, then we sew, this is a bias and it is very stretchy so make sure not to pull, continue sewing the pair until they are all done and then I press.

Now I'm using my very good ironing technique. If you haven't seen my video on this, I'll put a link in the notes below. This makes a big difference in the quality of your blocks and then I stack them again and this time I make a diagonal cut on the right side of the block and take the top fabric from the right pile and place it on the bottom, then match, sew and I press again. Now we stack the blocks this time. We're going to rotate the stack 90 degrees but you'll find that the edges won't line up very well, but that's okay because we'll trim them at the end and make a diagonal.

We cut on the left side of the block and this time we are taking the three fabrics from the top and we are putting them on the bottom part then we follow the same procedure we match we sew and then we press and we stack them again we make a diagonal cut on the right side of the block and then we take the top three fabrics and put them on the bottom, we match, we sew and we press now I chose to start with a 14 inch block so I can use a twelve and a half inch ruler to square up above you may find that you have a couple of blocks that are smaller than 12 and a half inches.

My personal rule is that as long as I can see an eighth of an inch, I simply trim them to 12 and a half, but if you find that some are even smaller than this, you may want to trim all the blocks a little smaller, perhaps to 12 and a quarter inches or even 12 inches and then I just put them on the wall. I get a lot of questions about what my design is. board, it's just sewing hack number four from my video, ten dollar store sewing hacks. I'll put a link to that in the notes below. I have two different types of blocks, one with the dark pieces in the corner and the other with the light ones. pieces in the corner and I'm alternating them on the wall.

This is a part I try not to think about too much. I usually set my timer and put them up on the wall and the only rule I try to follow is not to try to have two fabrics touching in the end I usually end up with one and I don't really worry too much about it and isn't it funny how these are all very different, very different patterns but somehow your eye just draws to it? together and it's not so ugly anymore, some of you may have noticed this really rough cut when you cut a big pile of fabric like this, not only do you have to use the sharpest blade, you also have to use the biggest blade, so He changed here to my 16 millimeters.

Alternatively, you can also divide the pile into smaller piles and each one can have a different cutting pattern. Now you can make this block of any size. You can use layer cakes. You can also make blocks of other sizes with leftover fabric. of your original pieces and I did that with my hospital quilt, if you use a different block size just take a sheet of paper in practice with a couple of cut lines just to make sure you have consistent piece sizes, just Keep in mind that you will use increases at least half an inch in width in each scene you make and you will want an extra 1 inch to trim People might ask why make an ugly quilt, it's a wombat, a waste of money batting in time, but the good thing of an ugly quilt the quilt is to use it more, you wouldn't dare put a beautiful one on, you can use it outside and you don't care if it gets dirty, you can take it to a picnic and you don't care if food is spilled on it or, like me, take it to hospital. warmth, love and color in one terrifying lonely experience and the funny thing is that because you are using it in all these places, there are wonderful stories and experiences that stick to the quilt and it becomes very valuable to those who want a printed copy of this . pattern and any of my other

free

stash busting patterns find them on my website and just make it at Kohl's under patterns and downloads so if you like this video please like it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell next to the subscribe button Subscribe to receive notifications when I make new videos.

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