The downtown quilt block is a simple three color design, which looks quite different depending on how you use it in your project! Have a look at the PDF guide to see the difference with and without sashing.
Video transcript:
Hi everyone I’m Paulette from Tulip Square and today I’m going to show you how to make a block we’re calling it downtown almost looks like sailboats doesn’t it
we’re going to head over to the sewing machine and make the downtown block
okay for this pattern you’re going to need white and two contrasting colors I’m using a blue print and a gold print and you’re going to start
by taking your gold squares and your
white squares of the same size and you’re going to draw a diagonal line
on each white square and pair it up with a gold square and then you’re going to sew on each side of
that line you drew quarter inch away make sure it’s a nice accurate quarter inch away and once you’ve sewn those then you’re going to cut on the line you drew
you end up with two half square triangles from each piece with no wasted fabric
and then you’re going to press them towards the gold
go ahead and do all that with your
gold and white squares
okay now you got eight of these triangle pieces and what you’re going to do is make
two pieces like this where you sew this edge of the white to this edge of the gold like so you’ve got a white a big gold corner up here and a big white corner up here
and then you’re going to sew oppositely
you’re going to sew the other two pairs like this
white up here and gold up here
Now you’ve got two pieces like this and two pieces like this and we’re going to set those aside for a minute and you’re going to take
four of these blue rectangles
we’re going to make flying geese
you’ve got white squares
we’re going to sew
white square on one end of each piece like this oops turn the fabric over okay
I’m going to sew
diagonally and you can either draw a line on each one or you can follow a line on your sewing machine like I like to do I’ve got
I’ll show you this over here
I got this thin line of tape
attached to my sewing machine and if I put my needle in the center position and I sew with let me get this a little closer
I put this point on the left edge of that little black line
and I put this other end on this edge of the black line I can just follow this up as I sew and I keep this on the black line
when I’m done I’ve got a straight quarter inch seam so I do that rather than drawing them
but that’s a personal choice not right or wrong it’s just a way to do it also when you’re sewing the diagonal line on something it’s easier to start up here where you’ve got a piece of fabric rather than starting down here where your sewing machine may have a tendency to chew up that end a little bit
I always start up here
so go ahead and sew a white square onto this left edge of each four pieces of the blue
once you’ve got the corner sewn on like this you’re going to leave it both of layers and you’re going to cut through both layers and cut it off leaving a
quarter inch seam allowance like that
and then you’re going to press this
this towards the corner so do that with the four pieces
and then we’ll move on now you’ve got four pieces like this and you’re going to take your remaining white squares and sew them to the other side
the same thing over here
and sew this way
and you will go right over that corner of that white and of this and that’s correct
go ahead and sew all of those now we do the same thing with these corners
We cut off the corner
and press that back like so now you have four flying geese now what you’re going to do is take the flying geese and take your pieces like this and you’re going to sew one
flying goose
to this edge of each one so you’re kind of making a diamond shape here
just like that blue on the right you’re going to sew all four like that now I’m just going to press these towards the blue triangles okay so now you’ve got four pieces like this two look like this with the gold
on the right and two pieces looks like this with a gold square on the left so what you’re going to do is pair them up one of each like this with the gold squares kind of towards each other and you’re going to take one of your blue
rectangles and you’re going to sew it right on each side of these two and you’re going to do the same thing with the other pair now I’m going to press these towards the blue strips now you have two pieces like this
going to set those aside a second and take our last two blue rectangles
and you’re going to sew them together with a gold square in between them
I have a strip like this and I also pressed those towards the two blue rectangles
you’re going to take one of these
put this in the middle
and the other one of these and put this in the middle now the only thing you have to decide is do you want
the four gold corners in the middle
or do you want the four white corners in the middle I think I like that better so I’m going to just sew this strip to here
and make sure you nestle your seams here so they’re nice and even and you sew that center strip to the other side and I’m just going to go press it and it’ll be all done
All done isn’t that cute kind of looks like sailboats doesn’t it hope you enjoyed that one
and so now you know how to make the downtown block you can also see that there’s different ways you can put the squares together just to give you a little variety this block when you put it together like this is a 10 inch be a 10 inch block it’s got its seam allowances so when it’s put together it would be a 10 inch block so if you like this video please hit the like button and then subscribe button and hit the little notify Bell if you want to be notified of when we put up new patterns which is every Saturday morning and if you want the PDF for this that shows you the quantities and the sizes of all the pieces there’s a link for it right up here somewhere so we hope you have a good week sewing and we will see you again next Saturday with a brand new video bye-bye