Tuesday Tutorial – Mile a Minute Quilt – Step 4

Mile a Minute blocks laid out

Sashing

We are going to start the sashing.  I found this to be one of the most time consuming tasks on this quilt, so we are going to do it over two weeks. 

Depending on what you have in your stash this might be time to make a trip to the quilt store.

 

Fabric requirements for sashing, cornerstones, border & binding:

1.3 meters of sashing material (or 1.42 yards, or 51 inches)

 .15 meters of cornerstone material (or .17 yards, or 6 inches) you can use scraps for this

2.1 meters of border fabric (or 2.3 yards or 82 inches)

 .5 meters of binding fabric (or .55 yards or 20 inches) – you might want the same fabric as your borders

Cutting

Cut 142 – 6 ½” X 1 ½” strips from your sashing fabric.  A quick way to do this is to cut five 6 ½” strips and then re-cut them into 1 ½” pieces.

Using 6 1/2" on an extra wide ruler

 

Using 6 1/2" on your cutting board with a narrow ruler

Re-cut into 1 ½” pieces

You will need to cut a couple more 1 ½” strips of the sashing fabric to get all 142 pieces.  You will have some fabric left over for the outside sashing which we will cover next week.

Lay the blocks out

At this point I like to lay the blocks out to get a visual, and to check that colours are somewhat evenly distributed throughout the quilt. You should have eight blocks across (columns) and ten down (rows).  See the first image at the top of this blog post.

What I do to help keep them in this lovely arrangement is to label each row (ten down) with a number, I use masking tape. 

Number the rows (click on image to see the numbers on the left side)

 

Then starting with number 1, gather each row across (your number should be on top). Until you have ten stacks of blocks.

 

 

You can now stack them neatly and safely (from pets, little children and maybe even yourself) until you are ready to sew.

One quilt all in a little pile

 

Sewing

Sew 7 of your 6 ½” x 1 ½” strips to the right side of each block in row one – except the last one.

Row one with sashing pieces

 

Press toward the sashing.

Join all of row one together, there should be a sashing piece between all the blocks with no sashing on either end of the row.

Row one sashed

 

 

 

Continue with rows 2 through 10.

It’s coming together.

I hope you are having as much fun as I am - if you are participating and/or following please leave a comment or questions if you have any.  If you do have a question, it might just be the answer someone else was looking for.

 

Next Tuesday we will continue with cornerstones and sashing between our rows.