Let’s Make a Quilt - Diamonds

Hey everyone, and welcome to "Let's Make a Quilt." I'm Ashley Hough. Over the next half hour, we're gonna have a lot of fun, I'm gonna teach you a thing or two, and we're gonna end up with a quilt made entirely from halfs square triangles that I'm calling Diamonds. While making this quilt, I'm gonna show you how to mark and chain piece oversized half square triangles, how to press and accurately square up those half square triangles using your standard square ruler or a specialty ruler, and then we'll talk about overall quilt construction and how to make sure all those seams nest. This is a great beginner quilt, because it's made entirely from the same unit, but half square triangles is a great unit to master, because we're gonna use it a lot in the future. But before we can make this quilt, let's go shopping.

I'm at Country Loft Quilt in Minnesota, and I'm ready to start shopping for my fabric for my quilt, Diamonds. For this quilt, we're looking for two shades of two colors, a light and medium or a light and dark of both. This quilt focuses on an overall design rather than blocks, so I don't want anything too crazy, no prints. We're going for solids or blenders. Let's do what we can find.

So we're back from the shop, and we have all the fabric we need, but sometimes it's a little bit easier to make a quilt if you can see it first. So here's our half square triangle quilt that I'm calling Diamonds. So I'm gonna show you how to ensure that you get a perfectly square half square triangle, and then I'm gonna talk about overall quilt construction and how to nest all the seams. That's from unit to unit and row to row, but then that's as far as I'm gonna take it, 'cause I don't actually finish quilts. For that, I call in my best friend, Penny Barnes, and she is going to do the actual finishing.

So when I send you a quilt, what do you do with it? So it's always a great day when the mail lady brings me one of Ashley's quilts, because they are so well constructed. So she's gonna give you great information on that today. When this quilt arrived, the first thing I thought was how geometric it was, and so my initial thoughts were, oh, I'll just mimic those lines and create a geometric design, but what happens a lot with quilting is you go to put the quilt on the frame and then the quilt says, "I don't wanna do that." The quilt decides what it wants to be. So with this quilt, I totally ignored the geometric designs and just focused on the fact that she had these great little half square triangles.

They measure about five inches, and so my design just focused on that five-inch square. So then by the time it was all done, we created almost an entirely new look for this quilt. So you can still see all your geometric designs, but you can see a great pattern that's a totally different design. Yes, absolutely. Quilting totally changes the quilts.

I love the way it was done. Yes, it gives it life. You did a great job making this quilt, but obviously I can't do my job until you do yours. I guess that means I better get started, so let's make a quilt. For me, the best part of starting a new quilt is seeing it come together with fabric, rather than just the design.

Our fabric is prepped, I've started cutting pieces, the machine and iron are ready to go, so let's get started. So we're back in the studio, and now it's time to actually start making this quilt. So as I've mentioned, this is made entirely from what's called a half square triangle. Very easy to make, but it's something that you should really master because it's something you're probably gonna use in a lot of quilts in the future, not just this one. So to get started, we need to first use our fabric that we bought and square it up.

It's very important to start with squared up fabric so we can get a nice, accurate cut. So I just have a little piece here so I can show you how to do that, but what I'm gonna do is take my long ruler. So I have a six by 24. You might have a 6 1/2 by 24. But I'm gonna take and I am going to place it on my fabric so it goes all the way across, and what I wanna do is make sure that the folded edge is right along one of the lines.

It can be the inch line, the half inch line. As long as your ruler covers your fabric and you have a line, that's the line you can use. So I'm going to pick this half inch line right here, of all my little half inch hashes, and I'm gonna make sure that it's lined up right along here. And what I'm doing is I'm trimming off this tiny little bit of what is essentially the store-bought edge. So when they cut your fabric, maybe they use scissors, maybe they use a rotary cutter, but it's usually not square.

I'm going to cut all along here, but I wanna make sure I'm holding my ruler down, so I actually use my entire body, and I'm gonna lean on this ruler and use my arm to hold it in place. And I come across here, cut that off, and now I have squared up fabric and I'm ready to go. These are oversized half square triangles that finish at five inches, so normally, if I was gonna do a finished five inch half square triangle, I'd cut a weird 7/8-inch measurement, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna round it up to six inches. So take my six inch ruler.

I now have my perfectly squared up edge, my straight edge here, and I can line that up with the edge of my ruler. Again, I'm cutting all across the width of the fabric, so I'm gonna use my whole arm again, place it down on the ruler, and I'm gonna cut. So I have a six-inch strip, and now I need six-inch squares. When you're cutting your squares, you always wanna start cutting from the selvage edge first. So this is our fold.

This is the salvage edge. Why it's important to start cutting from the selvage edge is when you have bigger pieces like this, like a six-inch one that you're cutting, by the time you get down to the fold, you might only have a little sliver left, but it might be big enough that you can open it up along that fold, and actually get another piece out of it. So I'm gonna again square up this edge. So I have the top and bottom lined up on my mat and I want to just cut off this selvage. So I'm gonna get about an inch, and I'm just gonna cut it off.

Now I'm ready to start cutting six-inch squares. So I like to have a variety of rulers. So I'm gonna go ahead and bring back in my six-inch-wide ruler, and I'm gonna use it to cut some six-inch squares. Again, I started at the selvedge edge, so I'm just gonna come across, go ahead, and cut one, just pick up my ruler, moved that one out of the way, and just slide my fabric down so I can cut more. Now there is a complete pattern that is available that goes along with what we're doing here in terms of instruction, but you can download that, and it'll give you complete step-by-step in terms of telling you exactly how many six-inch squares of each color you're going to need to cut.

So this is why I'm saying you want to start at the selvedge edge and work your way to the fold, 'cause this, you could actually open it up, and use as another piece. So we don't need that now, but I'll just set it aside. With this pattern, this is a fun quilt because it's kind of what I like to call mindless sewing in that once you cut all of your pieces, you can really just keep going in terms of sewing. Everything's cut the same size, so from every color of fabric, our gray, our two shades of our yellow, our green, everything is all the same size for our half square triangle. So I'm just gonna repeat the process.

So we're gonna mark the wrong side, diagonal line from corner to corner. This is a solid fabric. It pretty much looks the same on the right and the wrong side. I'm not worried about that. This obviously has a little bit of a print to it, so I wanna make sure I'm marking on the wrong side.

So I'm gonna take my square, take a ruler. This is again yet another ruler, but you need to make sure that your ruler is long enough that you can go from corner to corner. So I'm going to line it up. There's one corner here, another corner here, and I'm just gonna draw a line. Now, when I'm drawing a line, I wanna make sure that I'm holding my ruler pretty close to the edge, so that the actual tip of my pencil isn't snagging the fabric and bunching it.

I wanna make sure that it's a nice, accurate line. So I drew it pretty dark so I'd make sure you could see it. You only need to draw it dark enough that you can see it. So this might be a little bit even too dark. I'm gonna go ahead and mark a couple of these.

Now we're gonna put our squares together, right sides together. So I have my marks right here, and I'm gonna go ahead and line these up, and I'm gonna go ahead and pin. Normally if it's a little bit smaller of a square, you wouldn't have to, but I like to do everything in stages, so I would have all of my half square triangles that I need in this big stack. So it's a little bit easier to manage those if they are all pinned. So I'm just lining them up, right sides together.

Put a pin. Flip it around, make sure all of your edges are lined, and go ahead and put a pin. Just do this with all of the these squares that you've cut and marked. Right, like so. We'll do one more, because I'm gonna show you how to sew these using a method that I like to use, which is chain piecing.

So when you're chain piecing something, that means that you are going to piece together a long chain of pieces or units. It saves a little bit of time, it saves a little bit of thread, because you're able to do things a little bit quicker and I think it's just a really fun thing to do. So with our half square triangles that are now put together, we have our line down the center and we are going to be stitching 1/4 inch on both sides of that line. So I'm gonna take this up to my machine. I have a quarter-inch foot already on my machine, lower that down again.

I'm just gonna stitch right along the edge of my foot. Right here is right along that line, and I'm just going to sew. When I get close to the edge, I'm just going to stop. I have my needle down, and I'm gonna bring up the next one. So this is where the chain piecing part comes in.

I'm gonna sew right off of one, so just a couple stitches, bring my next one up, and stitch right onto the next one. Go all the way across, stitch right off the edge, bring the next one up, couple stitches off, so I have room for the point of that square, and go ahead and stitch. Right off. Bring the next one up. And just stitch right on that line.

So you would just do that over and over and over again. For every single half square triangle you have, you're gonna need to chain piece all of them together. When you get to the very end of all of your squares, I'm gonna go ahead and stitch all the way off. I'm gonna go ahead and raise my needle, gonna raise my presser foot, and then I'm gonna take everything off and just spin it around, 'cause again, we need to stitch quarter inch on both sides of that line. So however big of a pile you have, just bring it right around.

I'm holding my thread back out of the way, and now I'm just going to spin it around and do the exact same thing. So I'm stitching one quarter inch away from that line, and as I'm sewing with this one here, I'm kind of holding the next one up and getting ready to go. So since they are chain pieced together, we have this little thread chain that's holding it, so it's gonna automatically pull up that next piece. We just wanna make sure that we are straight when we stitch off of one, right on to the next. Again, get that next one ready.

Stitch right off of one, right onto the next. Right off that one, and right onto our last one. And again, just keep doing that over and over again until you get through all of your half square triangles. Once you do that, you have this long chain of pieces that are together and we need to cut 'em apart. So I like to just take my snips, I'm gonna come in here, cut them apart, and I like to stack them right on top of one another.

So again, you would have a lot more of these pieces if you're making all of them at once, which I recommend you do, but you're gonna stack everything together, right like so, clipping 'em apart, and then this makes it a little bit easier to pull out all of your pins, 'cause they're right here at the edge and you should be able to just kind of grab as many as you can at once, and pull 'em all out at the same time. If they're a little further down, you can kind of just flip through, find the head of that pin, and pull 'em out. Now that you have all of them stitched, it's time to cut them down the center on that line that we marked. I'll just do one to show. You can use a ruler if you want or you can just freehand.

I'm just gonna freehand right along the line, like so, and now it is time to press and square these up. So this is where the fact that they are oversized comes in a little bit handy, especially if you have never done half square triangles before. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna bring in my pressing mat in a minute and I'm gonna press this open, and then we need to square this to 5 1/2 inches. Now, we cut them oversized at six, so you should be trimming a little bit off of this. If you're not, you definitely wanna check your seam allowance and make sure you weren't stitching more than a quarter of an inch away, 'cause you wanna be trimming a little bit off.

So I'm gonna bring in my pressing mat, right like so, and the first thing I'm gonna do is what's called setting the seam. So I'm just gonna take my iron, set it on that seam, and let it sit. So all I'm doing is really pressing the fibers of the thread down into the fibers of the fabric. Once I've done this, I'm going to press towards the gray. I'm gonna do this because the gray is the color in every single half square triangle, and I just wanna be consistent.

So I have the gray on top, I've already set the seam, and all I'm gonna do is fold this up, use my fingers first to press from the center towards the outside, get it folded over, and then I can come in with my iron and actually press it flat. So, and then do that again with every single one that you've made. So always set your seam first. Have the gray on top so you can press towards the gray, use your fingers to fold it open first, then come in with your iron, and give it a good press. Once you have all of them pressed, now we can square them up.

So I mentioned that I'm gonna show how to do this using a standard square ruler and a specialty ruler. So here is my standard square ruler. I like to use the rulers that have a little bit of grip on 'em. That's an Omnigrip ruler, and our specialty ruler that I'm gonna show is what's called a block lock ruler. So this is one that actually has a channel here that holds your seam allowance and locks onto it.

Just makes it a little bit easier to to square it up if you're having problems with your ruler slipping. Not a necessity, but does make this go a little bit easier, but I'm gonna show both. So here is one of our half square triangles that we need to square up to 5 1/2 inches. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to lay my ruler on my half square triangle with this center line, there's a diagonal line on the ruler. It needs to be exactly on the center of that seam we just did.

Once it is, I wanna make sure that I have a little bit of fabric showing on both sides of the ruler that I'm gonna trim away, and I wanna make sure that my 5 1/2 inch line here, there is fabric extending beyond it. What I don't wanna do is accidentally trim too much off of two different sides, that I now make it to where I don't have enough that it can be 5 1/2 inches. So once I know that I'm there, I'm gonna hold it and come in and trim. When I'm holding a ruler, whether it's a grippy ruler or not, I always have my pinky finger off the edge, and that's gonna help that ruler from shifting or moving where I don't want it to go. So trim that.

We have our little pieces, brush 'em aside, flip this around, and now those two perfect edges that we just cut get lined up on the 5 1/2 inch line of our ruler. The diagonal should still be going down the center and we should still have just a tiny bit to trim off of both sides. Again, my pinky finger is anchoring that ruler, and we're just gonna square it up like so. And now we have a perfectly square 5 1/2 inch but will be a five inch finished half square triangle. This is why doing them oversized is so important, 'cause it allows you to be able to trim them down that way.

Especially if this is your first time making half square triangles, you're not so focused on the sewing and so focused on the pressing that your half square triangle doesn't turn out perfect. Now, if you're gonna do that with your specialty ruler, what you're gonna do is essentially the exact same thing. We're gonna place this on our square, and we're gonna do it until we feel the ruler lock onto the seam. So you're gonna feel it. As soon as it gets on that seam, it won't move.

We're gonna do the same thing, where it's now locked on the seam in the center. I have a little bit on either side. It extends beyond the 5 1/2 inch line. Go ahead and securely hold the ruler, trim, brush those away like so, flip it around, and now again, lock it on that seam so it locks right there, and you can just slide it up, 5 1/2 inch right there on the edges we just trimmed. Come in here, and now we have, again, a perfectly squared up half square triangle.

So you're going to do that over and over again until you have all your half square triangles of all your different colors made and ready to go, and then it is time to assemble this quilt. So I mentioned that there's a pattern that you can download that goes along with this quilt, and the very last page of that pattern is gonna be what's called an assembly diagram. This is very important because, again, this quilt is called Diamonds, and if you didn't put your half square triangles together in the right configuration, it wouldn't actually turn into diamonds. So this is our assembly diagram, and what you're gonna do is you're going to grab the color associated with whichever row you're working on, and you're going to lay them out in that direction and put your half square triangles together. So I'm gonna start with this top row here.

Here's our first one. Here's our second one. I wanna take my first and second half square triangle, and I wanna lay them out so that they are the same orientation that they are on our assembly diagram. So you might be thinking, "Well, that seems really, really easy to do. I can just glance at it, bring it up, and sew it." It's very easy to accidentally get them going in the wrong direction, so always consult this assembly diagram.

So here's our first two. So we're gonna take them, right sides together. I'm gonna go ahead and put a pin in it, and we can stitch. Now, when I'm gonna take this to my machine to stitch, I only have that one pin in the middle to just hold 'em so they don't move. What can happen when you're sewing over the seams of the beginning and end with a half square triangle is that your foot wants to follow that seam, so I start maybe like one stitch in from the edge rather than starting right at the edge, so I can sort of get a little bit of a head start.

But if you find that your machine isn't wanting to go forward, see how it's kind of stopping? All I'm gonna do is use my finger, my fingernail, the tip of your scissors, just kind of raise the front of that presser foot up just a little bit, help it get over the sea of that half square triangle, and then you can stitch. Of course, take out that pin as you get close to it. Don't sew over it, and then same thing here at the end. So I have this other diagonal seam of that half square triangle coming here, and that presser foot is gonna wanna follow it a little bit.

So again, I'm just gonna use the tip of my fingernail. I'm releasing the presser foot pressure just the tiniest amount, get over that seam, and then finish stitching. Now I wanna point out real quick that I am stitching using black thread, 'cause I want you to be able to see what I'm stitching. Normally you would wanna use light gray and off-white, something that's not gonna show up so much. Just keep that in mind when you're doing your thread selection.

So back to our assembly diagram, which shall I do this a couple more times here. We've done one and two. We need to bring in our third piece. Again we're gonna lay it out, making sure that it is the same orientation on the assembly diagram as it is here. Once we have confirmed that, go ahead and put it right sides together.

Line it up. I'm gonna put one pin in the middle just to hold it, and I'm gonna use those same techniques sewing this one as I did before, lifting that presser foot if I need to. One thing that always gets me caught up when I'm starting to sew is when I use that automatic thread cutter on the machine, like I just did, 'cause it pushes the needle thread down into the bobbin case. So I just take my scissors and move that thread tail up to the top, and then usually that keeps it so I have any problem starting when I use that thread cutter. Again, I'm gonna pull out that pin, use my finger to raise up that presser foot, stitch right off the edge, and we've got another one assembled.

Okay, now I'm gonna show one more here, 'cause this one is slightly different in terms of when we're putting 'em together. So far we haven't had to nest a seam, but we are moving up to the fourth one over in the row, which is right here, and this one is gonna go in this direction. So for the first time, we have opposing colors coming together, which means we have a seam here. Now, because we pressed all of our half score triangles towards the gray, these seams should nest, and by that I mean one seam is pressed one direction, one is pressed the other way, so they should kind of lock together. So again, I'm gonna go right sides together, but this time instead of putting my pin in the middle, I'm gonna put my pin closer to this lower edge here, 'cause what I'm doing is feeling with my fingers to make sure that those two seams nest right on top of each other.

Once I've confirmed that they do, then go ahead and put a pin, and then up here at the upper edge, I should have no problem starting to sew, 'cause there are no seams at all to contend with. Go ahead and move my thread. I'm gonna sew up to my pin and take it out. My seam should still be nested and as I sew up to the seam allowance, I wanna make sure it stays going in the direction that it is, that the presser foot doesn't accidentally push it going the other direction. Lift the tip of that presser foot, and sew right off the edge.

So that's how you're gonna nest your seams when you get to that area here on the assembly diagram. The next one, we have, again, a slightly different assembly, in that now, rather than having the same colors coming together at a slant, we have the same colors coming together to create the top point of a diamond. We have our seams here that will not automatically nest. Now you're probably thinking, "Well, why didn't you have me press some of these seams to the yellow then, or to a different direction?" And that's 'cause I didn't want this pattern to be too tedious. I wanted you to be able to just go through all the steps, pressing all of of the half square triangles towards the gray.

So on the couple, there's only a few that you have to do this on, that don't nest, I'm gonna take it and I'm gonna fold it, again, right sides together. I'm gonna come in here with my snips and about an inch or so down, I'm just going to snip into that seam allowance, and I'm gonna fold this seam allowance the other direction. So I'm gonna fold it towards me or towards this yellow fabric, and now those seams nest. I can take a pin, and I can hold that newly nested seam allowance together, and now I'm ready to sew this one. So I'm starting up here at the top where it is the bulkiest, but I'm gonna use my pin to help me get started.

So I know that my pin is a good five or six stitches away from the edge. So I know that I can hold this pin and do a couple stitches right up to it before I have to take it out. And now I can stitch all the way down this seam, cut my threads, and I'm ready to go. So you're gonna repeat this a lot, but those are the three basic ways that you're gonna be putting it together. How you start and stop when it's on a diagonal to avoid getting stuck on those seam allowances, how you start and stop when the two opposing colors come together so you nest those seams, and how you start and stop when you're creating the points of that diamond, so you have to actually make those seams nest.

Now I'm just gonna kind of rinse and repeat and keep doing this until I get this whole top row done, and then I'll come back and show you how to actually put the rows together. So I have my last unit of my half square triangles attached to the end here of my first row, and what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that I'm going to mark the right hand side of this row. All I'm gonna do that with is a pin. This is important, because when I'm doing my assembly, I wanna do row by row by row, so I wanna go through and do every single row and then press them and then assemble my rows. If I didn't mark the right hand side, it'd be really, really easy to accidentally flip one upside down, have it backwards, and then again, we're not gonna have this overall diamond look.

So make sure that you're putting a pin in to mark your right side. Once you have all of your rows assembled, you need to press them. So what you're gonna do is you're going to pick right or left. Doesn't really matter, but start with one. You're gonna start, press all the seams in this row to the right, all of them in this row to the left, all to the right, all to the left, and if you do that, then when you actually put your rows together, those seams will nest.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring up this second row that I have already made. So I have the second row already assembled, already made, and again, I have marked my right hand side and I'm gonna look here on the back, and I can see that I have pressed all of these seams to the left, which means for this one, I need to press all of my seams to the right, which means towards this pin that I put in place. So I'm gonna bring in my pressing mat, right like so, and here's my pin, so I wanna press all of my seams towards the pin, and you're gonna just have to figure out which way is easiest for you to do this, if it is to push to the right or the left, or I like to press either towards myself or away from myself. So I'm gonna take and lay out my pieces so that here's my pin. This is to the right.

I'm now pressing my seams away from myself, so I've used my hand or my fingers to kind of push them that way first, pressed it away, and just gonna keep moving my way down my whole row. Right, this one is pressed, ready to go. We have our number one strip. Gonna lay it out here. And again, pin is on the right side.

We have our number two strip. We're going to lay it out, again making sure the pin is on the right side and making sure, this is gonna sound trivial, but making sure that number two is below number one. Don't accidentally bring it in and then put it on the top. You wanna make sure you're going in the right order. So you should start seeing your lines come together.

You can always refer back to your assembly diagram to make sure that everything is going in the right direction. But we're going to now assemble our rows together, right sides together, and all of our seams should nest. So these seams nest nicely. The only thing you wanna take into consideration is that we do still have these points of our half square triangles that we don't wanna lose them, meaning we sew more than a quarter of an inch, and we don't wanna have a gap between them, meaning we sew less than a quarter inch. So make sure that you're aligned not only with your nested seams, but the edges of your fabric are aligned, and then always make sure that you have that accurate quarter inch seam allowance.

So I'm gonna work my way along, just using my fingers. I'm kind of sliding the fabric between them, making sure they're nested, and I'm putting in a pin. When I am pinning nested seams, I like to always pin the seam that you're going to hit second. By that I mean the one on the bottom is going to the left, so you're technically gonna sew over that one first, so I want my pin to be in the seam that I'm gonna sew over second. That way, by the time I get to it and I'm at that pin to remove it, I've already made it to this seam, so when I take the pin out, it's really not holding that nested seam anymore.

I've already stitched it in place. Now that I have everything pinned together, we can go ahead and stitch our row, and this is really easy, just straight stitching. We're gonna use this same technique where we're starting, where there's a seam here at the edge. So we wanna start either a stitch or two in or lessen that pressor foot pressure with your fingernail to get it going. And then we're really just sewing straight.

I'm gonna sew up until I get to that seam, making sure my seam out stays the direction I want it to go. Take out that pin, and repeat all the way down. Once you have the first two rows together, you're going to just repeat over and over again, always referencing that assembly diagram to make sure that you're putting the correct row on in the correct way. And then I am going to take my pins out of that right hand side as I move my way down, just because I don't want all those extra pins in there that I can then poke myself with later. But you're just gonna do the same thing over and over again.

So to save you from having to watch me do that, I already have all of the remaining rows already done. So I'm gonna go ahead and just add these two that we just put together to the rest of the quilt, so we can finish it off. There's nothing more satisfying than finishing up the last seam of a quilt, cutting that thread, and knowing that your quilt top is finished. So now we have all of our half square triangles together. Our Diamonds quilt top is finished, and now it's time to hand this off to the professional and let Penny work her magic, making this beautiful with quilting and getting it finished.

Hi, everyone. I have Ashley's quilt. She's finished her quilt that she called Diamonds. When I first looked at this quilt, I thought I would just be maybe following and accenting these lines and making it very linear, but as soon as I put it on the frame, the quilt told me it wanted to do something totally different. I just wanna give you a few tips for your backings.

When you're choosing backings for your quilt, there are all kinds of wide backs available these days, all colors, all designs, a lot to choose from. If you're making a larger quilt, you might wanna choose a backing that's maybe 90 inches, 108. I've seen backings as wide as 120 inches, so you could really make a large quilt. This particular quilt, we just used a regular fabric, two sections, and seamed those together. One thing to keep in mind with those fabrics is some can be directional, like this particular one has little bunnies that go up and down, so this quilt, I put on sideways so that my bunnies would be going in the right direction.

Another thing to keep in mind to make your longarmer happy is to add five inches at least all the way around. When we load that quilt on, we need that extra room so that we can make sure that there's enough fabric to finish the quilt. So I'm gonna get started on Ashley's quilt now. As you can see with this quilt, I'm ignoring her lines altogether. I'm focused on these little five-inch finished squares, so I'm using my handy dandy ruler and just going from corner to corner on each of these squares.

I use the ruler on this 'cause I want these lines to look more precise. If I tried to freehand that, it would probably turn out a little bit wonky, which as we all know is a professional quilting term, wonky. But yeah, the ruler helps keep me steady and keeps me going in the right direction. I love the look of echoing my quilting. I think it adds another dimension to the quilting, really makes it pop and stand out more, as opposed to just one line.

It'd be kind of dull. All right, as you can see, I've got this great little curved diamond shape going, but there's too much space in the middle, so I'm gonna add a second diamond in the middle of my big diamonds. I'm gonna use the same ruler, and just move it up a little bit. And then I'm gonna echo that one as well. I tend to just go back over my lines a little bit and then pull that bobbin thread up through the top, and snip it.

There are some people who really like to bury all their threads, but I don't have that much time in my life, so I'm gonna do it as as easy as possible. So that's the last little diamond on this row. Okay, now obviously I don't have the quilt finished yet, but I'm gonna roll it forward, keep going so I can get this quilt done, and I'm so excited to get it back to Ashley, 'cause I know she's gonna love it. So we're back and the quilt is finished, and I hope you can really appreciate the work that you saw Penny doing to actually finish this quilt. So we had just a essentially plain quilt top, and now it is beautifully quilted, it is bound, it's finished, and it's actually ready to be used.

So thank you for doing that. And do you have a favorite part about this quilt? I do. I think the techniques that you used to create those perfect points makes everything lay perfectly flat. So for me, as a longarmer, that is a an absolute dream, to be able to lay that on your frame and the quilt lays perfectly flat.

That's perfect. And now when you're picking your thread color, I know you didn't just do this 'cause it is my favorite color. Gray is wonderful, but why did you pick gray thread? I picked the gray because it's just a great neutral. It's a very soft gray, and so it blends in with all the different colors that you've used in the quilt.

That's perfect. Now, when we were doing the assembly, I used chain piecing, 'cause it is my absolute favorite piecing method, but you kind of did a version of that with this quilt, right? I did, yep. With these, focusing on these five inch squares, I was able to just move all the way across the quilt and back again, and to do that in all the bigger rows, and that means I don't have to stop and start all the time. I did have to stop and start when I came back in to put the little diamonds in the middle.

But other than that, it made it really easy. It made it flow really well. I love that. So speaking of stopping and starting in the diamonds, just because one of the things that I talked about was nesting seams, and sometimes I wonder how you're gonna handle what is kind of a bulky seam. So in this case, I mean, it looks like you just went around them, but how do you normally handle the bulky seams?

Exactly. Sometimes you handle it by breaking the needle and the thread, but yes. So, but doing this, I was able to kinda avoid that bulk. That's perfect. Yep, it worked really well.

Do you have a least favorite part about this quilt? I don't really have a least favorite part about this quilt, but I think it's really cool how I ignored the geometric design, and just added the curves in there. Yep. So we have a completely different design. We do, and that's always so fun about getting my quilts back from Penny, is that I send them to her with sort of no idea of what she's gonna do, and it's a complete surprise when I get 'em back, and I always love to see how the entire quilt top has been completely transformed into something different and magnificent and beautiful.

Ah, thanks. Of course. Well, with this one all wrapped up, what do you think? Should we start planning the next one? I think we should.

All right, well, so be sure to join us again for another episode of "Let's Make a Quilt."