It’s the final countdown!

You’re in the home stretch of the Shattered Star Quilt Along and Week 8 has you tackling a few final steps to put the finishing touches on your quilt.

You’ve worked hard to get to this point, so let’s give it one last push to make this the most epic quilt you’ve ever made.

Now that your quilt is fully quilted, we need to square her up in preparation for the binding.

I’m walking you though how to do just that.

*This post contains affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, if you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a commission. 

LESSONS LEARNED TO DATE

Before diving into a new quilting technique, it’s always fun to check in and remind yourself just how much knowledge you’ve added to your quilt skill set:

• Checked out all the essential tools and notions you’ll need.
• Tackled picking your fabric and considered their colour values,
• Learned all the ins and outs of pressing them nice and flat; and
• Picked up tips on cutting them accurately.
• Made half square triangles using the 8-at-a-time method.
• Learned how to trim your HSTs using a regular and specialty HST ruler.
• Tackled small piecing and learned about Leaders & Enders. 
• Learned how to nest your seams.
• Put nesting seams into action as you stitched your blocks & rows together. 
• Learned how to baste your quilt.

Let’s add another quilty skill to that ever-expanding list!

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO SQUARE UP YOUR QUILT

For Week 8 of the Shattered Star Quilt Along you’ll need the following tools and notions to square up your Shattered Star quilt:

• Shattered Star Quilt Pattern
• Your quilted Shattered Star quilt – mine features a combination of Little Town fat quarter bundle paired with AGF PURE Solids in: *Flamingo, *Smooth Pebble, *Icy Mint, *Spruce and *Zambia Stone.
• *Backing – mine is *Little Town in Winterberry Spice. 
• *Batting – my go-to is 100% cotton batting.
• *Cutting mat 
• *Rotary Cutter 
• *Square ruler 
• *Long rectangular ruler

HOW TO SQUARE UP YOUR QUILT

You might be wondering why you need to square up your quilt.

At this point, you should have all these straggly bits of excess batting and backing fabric around the perimeter of your quilt. And we want to bring it back to a nice crisp squared up quilt so that you have a nice foundation for applying your binding.

And with all those rogue bits, it can be a little tough to know where to start, not to mention a little daunting to make that first cut.

Been there! Which is why I’m excited to show you how I go about tackling this quilty step.

STEP 1

Lay your quilted Shattered Star quilt on your self-healing cutting mat so that one of the corners is flat and smooth.

Using your *square ruler, lay the ruler on the corner of your quilt lining up with one the lines in your quilt block. Use the lines of your quilt and the lines on your ruler as guides to get a nice square corner.

Trim both the top and side of your first quilt corner.

Make sure you are trimming as little of your quilt top in this step so that you preserve any blocks with points (i.e. if you trim too much, you’ll lose the ¼” seam allowance needed for attaching your binding and if you have any half square triangles along the perimeter of your quilt, you’ll loose those points.).

STEP 2

Once you have your first corner trimmed, switch to a long *rectangular ruler to make quick work of trimming the first side of your quilt.

Use the freshly cut line from squaring up your corner as the guide to line up the top of your ruler. Then line up with the edge of your quilt and a seam within your quilt to keep a straight line along the side before making another cut. Pull your quilt up so that a new section of your quilt is on your cutting mat and continue trimming your way down the side of your quilt until you get to your next corner.

Once you reach your next corner, switch back to the square ruler and repeat the process from Step 1.

Continue working your way around the perimeter of your quilt, working in sections that fit your cutting mat.

That’s it! That’s all there’s to squaring up your quilt!

VIDEO – HOW TO SQUARE UP YOUR QUILT

This one is so much easier to understand when you see it in action.

GIVEAWAY 

With the last week of the Shattered Star Quilt Along upon us I wanted to celebrate all your hard work with some more of my quilty faves from our Week 8 Sponsors: Martelli Notions and Cottoneer Fabrics! 

I had the Round-About Cutting Mat in my shopping cart for well over a year before I took the plunge and bought her and I kick myself for waiting so long. I shared my love for this quilty tool back in Week 3 when we were trimming our HSTs. I can’t get through an HST trimming session without one of these! And I’m so excited for you to get your hands on one too. Martelli was super generous and included the ironing board too! 

Since it’s safe to say you’re a fellow fabric lover like me, I wanted to introduce you to one of my fave quilt shops Cottoneer Fabrics. I’m always tempted by the gorgeous textiles and bundles Andrea stocks in her family run shop. She’s generously giving a $50 USD gift certificate for this week’s giveaway! 

To enter the giveaway, you must:

• Be a Shattered Star QAL newsletter subscriber.
• Be following @martellinotions, @cottoneer and @shannonfraserdesigns on Instagram
• Post a photo on Instagram of your bound Shattered Star quilt between November 30, 2020 and December 6, 2020 at 11:59 pm.
• Instagram account must be public.
• Tag @martellinotions, @cottoneer and @shannonfraserdesigns
• Include the hashtags #shatteredstarquilt #shatteredstarqal

Week 8 giveaway is open internationally.

In Part 2 we’ll dive into creating your binding and attaching it to your quilt. But first, get those Shattered Star quilts nice and squared up!

xo,

Shannon

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