Part Two – Slicing and Dicing Technique

Tutorial by: Carli Heinrichs of Good Earth Quilting. Visit Carli’s blog too.

See Part One: Two Hour Table Runner – Fast & Stylish Too!

Step 1: You’ll start with 5 fat quarters, one the focus fabric, 2 lights and 2 darks.

Step 2: Layer the fat quarters face up, 1st light fabric, 1st dark fabric, focus fabric, 2nd light fabric, 2nd dark fabric.

Step 3: Make only 4 vertical cuts with rotary cutter across and through all layers of the fat quarters. Make these cuts off centre on any angle that is workable for sewing together fast, try to vary the width of each cut, this is where it gets very individual.

Step 4: Start with the far left stack of slices:

• Take 1 top slice and move it to the bottom of the 1st stack.
• Moving to the right always, take 2 top slices and move them to the bottom of 2nd stack.
• Take 3 top slices and move to the bottom of 3rd stack.
• Take 4 top slices and move to the bottom of 4th stack.
• 5th stack, leave whole.

Tip: You’ll know you’ve done it correctly if you can see one fabric slice from each of the 5 fat quarters chosen. These will form the first block.

Step 5: Next, sew all the slices into blocks pieced together, working on only one whole block at a time. This prevents getting the blocks mixed up.

Step 6: Always stack the pieced blocks in the same order as they came off your table.

Step 7: Press seams at the end of completing each block, not during or after each seam, it’s unnecessary.

Step 8: Once all blocks are pieced and pressed, turn the blocks so that the seams are now horizontal to you.

Step 9: Cut another 4 cuts with your rotary cutter and ruler across the pieced blocks.

Step 10: Repeat the shuffling as done before to the stacks of pieced strips.

Step 11: Sew all the strips together once more and finish with trimming the blocks to a 16 in. square.

Step 12: If you can’t fit the 16″ square, don’t worry about it. Just square up and trim your blocks to a matching size.