I put together a straight forward little tutorial to explain what I mean. A lot of you might already know how this works, but in case some of you don’t…

One thing before we get started – it’s key that you use a uniform 1/4″ seam allowance for all of this piecing or else it won’t all line up correctly.

So let’s say you want to piece together this little bit of plaid:

It’s pretty clear how you sew together most of it…

But what to do with the center bit that falls right in the middle of all four portions?

First sew it onto the lower corner of the upper left portion – but leave the top of the seam unsewn (hence partial seams!)

Then sew on the bottom left portion and then the bottom right portion. Three portions are now sewn to the center piece and now you’ll use that unsewn part of the seam to sew on the final portion.

With the top right portion placed on the lower right portion, right sides together, sew them together. (BTW – think that it’s time for me to get myself a new cutting mat?!?)

When you’re done, your piecing will look like this.

Finally, finish up by folding your piecing down the middle, right sides together, and sew the remaining seam until you get down to the already sewn part of the seam. You’re all done!

See? Easy enough! It gets more involved when you have a ton of these partial seams in your quilt top (there were a LOT in the top I just finished), but I find that having all the cut out pieces displayed on my design wall, thinking it through, assembling it piece by piece, and then portion by portion, works well for me. I don’t think I could think it through if I didn’t have it all laid out in front of me though. I’m  a visual person.  I need to see it to get it.  This is just one more reason I think that a design wall is one of the most valuable things you can have in your sewing space!

You can find it here!

Also, thank you so much everyone for your kind comments about my last post. We’re very excited!!

Here it is!

Check it out over here!

Check it out here!

I recently took a workshop from the amazing Angela Walters and one of her biggest tips about quilting is that you need to plan how you’re going to work through the quilt in advance. This of course makes sense, but sometimes I get too impatient and just jump in. Not anymore!

I should add that my straight line quilting has improved dramatically since I started sewing on the Janome Horizon. (Full disclosure – they did sponsor me with the machine but I would recommend it regardless.) The combination of their feed system and being able to turn the pressure of my presser foot waaaay down have made it so that I don’t deal with fabric shifting like I used to. Amanda Jean did a post on this recently and the follow up post has lots of helpful ideas.

Additionally, the size of the Horizon makes it so that I can easily turn the quilt in my machine as needed. And there’s a lot of turning happening with this quilting because I turn a lot of corners. I keep my lines equidistant by just using the edge of my walking foot as the guide for each seam.

The quilting started with this basic idea.

We’ve all seen it before – the idea of making blocks into beads on a string… Pretty simple, right? But with all of that negative space, I knew that I wanted to fill it in with dense straight line quilting, so I had the idea to echo quilt this first concept.

So I started quilting!

First I sewed a line that was the beginning of the idea.

Then I worked my way out to the edge of the quilt, filling in all of the negative space. My quilt was in my machine turned 180 degrees (meaning sewing from the bottom to the top) while quilting these lines and I slowly worked my way out, so that more and more of the quilt was to the left of my machine. You can see that when a smaller section of the negative space got filled in (like between the blocks or below the bottom block) I just stopped making those turns.

Next up, it was time to fill in two of the blocks with freemotion quilting. I did this before finishing the straight lines so that I could keep the fabric smooth through the whole process. If I quilted dense lines all around the blocks, and then quilted the blocks, any extra fabric (in an ideal world there wouldn’t be any but I’ve learned this lesson the hard way) wouldn’t have anywhere to go and would bubble and ripple.

I then continued with filling in the straight lines. Because there’s so little negative space between the blocks, I knew I had to fill in the framing line around the second set of blocks now or there wouldn’t be room for it later. Lots of planning ahead!

Then I filled in all of the space between them. There was only room for a couple of complete lines (that run from the top to the bottom of the quilt) between the blocks, so I then filled in the top and bottom spaces, again echoing the pattern that the quilting lines created.

And then it was time to freemotion quilt the last two blocks!

Finally, the last framing line happened…

I echo quilted around it to the edge of the quilt…

And finished up by filling in the corners, again echoing the existing quilting pattern.

And there you have it! It is time consuming, all of these straight lines, but I think that the result is so worth it. I love that it is quilting that takes the piecing in to consideration, yet it is graphic and works to create a very modern feeling quilt.

Hope you enjoy it!

Check it out!

My Modern Block of the Month kicks off today over at Sew, Mama, Sew! I’ll be doing a new block design and tutorial each month for the next year. Check out July’s block!

Also, I’m going to be on Pat Sloan’s radio show later today at 1:00pm PST, 4:00pm EST. We’re chatting about The Modern Quilt Guild and Block Party! Please do listen if you can!

Finally, I also did a minor blog revamp over the weekend. Click on through if you read me in a reader and you wanna check it out.