Sew Along with Pattern 595 – X Marks the Spot Table Runner

We’ve had several requests to make a video for this pattern, so today you get your wish! This is our popular X Marks the Spot table runner. It’s a great pattern to get to know your half square triangles and flying geese. Get the pattern, then watch the video to see how easy it is! Here’s the pattern: X Marks the Spot Quilted Table Runner Pattern

Video transcript:

hi I’m Paulette Morrissey from Tulip Square and this week I’m going to show you how to make this runner called X Marks the Spot this is one of our popular patterns and it’s one that we’ve had several requests if we would make a video of it so I’m going to go ahead and make a video today and I wanted to mention that in the picture in the pattern it’s mostly white with two other accent colors when I’m making it today I’m going to make it two colors with a little bit of accent white just to show you how different the same pattern can look just by changing your fabrics so we’re going to head over to the sewing machine and get started on this and it is a cute pattern let’s go

okay to make this pattern there’s a good number of pieces and they’re all in the pattern which will be a link at the end of the video if you want to download that so I’m starting with the two and a half inch squares and I’m going to make nine pairs and sew them up just together along one side quarter inch seam to make sure you got nice quarter inch seams so I’m going to sew nine pairs together okay I’ve got these all sewn and pressed and now I’m going to sew green squares to this one side of six of them and then I’m going to sew another white square to the opposite side of the remaining three of them so I’ll have six like this and three like this you’ve got six pieces like this and three pieces like this so you’re going to sew them together like so we have three blocks like that and when I press them all I pressed them all towards the same color in this case I pressed them all towards the green so that when I sew them together they nestle nicely and the seams line up nicely now you have three blocks like this and if you happen to be following along in the pattern you’ll notice that my whites and my greens are reversed from what they would be in the pattern and that’s because I’m just making this a little bit different you can see a completely different look instead of a runner that’s predominantly white this one’s going to be predominantly green with some white other parts in it so when you’re making your own you would pick your own colors anyway so I’m just showing you a different option so next I’m going to pair up these bigger squares both colors I’m going to draw a diagonal line on the back of the lighter two of the colors I’m going to draw that right now you want a nice diagonal line nice and accurate like so

and I’m going to sew a quarter inch seam on each side of that line and I’m going to do that with all of these pairs

One little thing I wanted to point out when you’re doing pieces like this that you have to line up the two and maybe most of you already know this but I’m going to show you anyway when you take the two pieces if you tap them together just like as if you were doing that with a stack of paper and then you do them the other way they line up beautifully it’s a lot quicker than trying to fiddle around with the two pieces of fabric so just take the two put them somewhere near each other doesn’t matter and then you just tap them one way and then turn and tap them the other way and they’re lined up perfect now once you’ve sewn on both sides of the line you drew you’re going to cut on the line you drew

giving yourself a nice quarter inch seam allowance on each piece and then you’re going to go press these open I like to press towards the darker side I’ll press these all towards the green and I’ll be right back and now we’ve got all of our little half square triangle pieces and we’re going to set those aside and next we’re going to make some flying geese and if you don’t know what flying geese are they are where you have a rectangle like so and you’re going to sew two pieces you’re going to sew one in each corner you’re going to sew across here and then it gets cut so it’s like that and you’re going to sew another one over here so we’re going to start by sewing diagonal line from here to here now a couple things I want to tell you first of all you can draw a line on here and follow the line and sew that way or what I like to do is I’ve got a little tape on my sewing machine that lines up with the center line so what I do is I line up this point with the bottom it has to be on this edge of this little line I line up the bottom there and the top of it is lined up with my needle and then I just keep my point on that line as I sew and when I’m done I end up with a perfect line like that so that’s if you don’t feel like sewing drawing all those lines on them secondly I want to point out when you’re doing things where you’re sewing from a point to a point if you start on the point along a fabric edge as opposed to starting on this point this way it tends to get chewed up in your machine a lot less than if you sew from here this is two little points like to get just chomped up in my machine so I always sew from the side that has a piece of fabric with it so I’m going to go and sew a square on one corner of each of these now once you’ve got that diagonal seam sewn on each one of them you’re going to cut on the right side of that seam leaving a quarter inch seam allowance just going to cut that off and then you’re going to press this towards the corner we’ll do that on all of them

now I’ve got all these sewn and I’m going to put the second half on each one and sew like so and then same thing cut off the edge and press it open now we have all our flying geese done they look like this okay so now I’m going to take one of my flying geese pet pieces and one of my half square triangles and I’m going to sew a half square triangle to each end of six of the flying geese pieces so you’ve got this so the this color goes like this I have all these pieces done and you’re going to take the rest of these flying geese and you’re going to sew them to opposite sides of each of your checkerboard squares and they get sewn with the big arrow pointing towards the checkerboard like so now I have three pieces like this now what you’re going to do is take these other pieces that you just sewed and you’re going to sew one on the top of each one and one to the bottom of each one you got a nice looking block like that and make sure you line up all your seams when you’re doing this so it looks good okay so now you’ve got three blocks like this and what you’re going to do next is you’re going to sew them in a row in a long strip and you’re going to sew them separated by sashing strips so we’re going to have a sashing strip a block a sashing strip a block a sashing strip and a block and a final sashing strip so you’re going to have four sashing strips and three blocks in a row so go ahead and sew those together next

Now you’ve got one long strip like this sashing block sashing block sashing block and sashing now all you have to do is take your longer pieces of sashing or border strip and sew them to these two long edges and now the final edge is on and it is done pretty cute isn’t it kinda hard to show you the whole thing I’ll hold it up in a second this runner when it’s finished is 14×44 inches it’s a nice good size for most tables it was pretty easy to make it took me a little bit more than an hour to put the whole thing together and I and I just wanted to mention that if you’re new to half square triangles or flying geese or anything like that with diagonal stitching this is a good pattern it’s easy enough it’s got a nice finished look when it’s done and it’s a good intro to doing things like that if you’ve never done it before those are all easy things to do and once you do them step by step they’re pretty easy and if you would like to get this pattern there is a link for the download up here somewhere and so if you like this video please hit the like button hit the Subscribe button and hit the notify little bell if you’d like to be notified when we put up a new video which is every Saturday so I hope you enjoyed this video and we’ll see you next week with a brand new one bye-bye