Quilt 2: Cutting (after the smelling salts)

(picking myself up off the floor, thankful for smelling salts, trying to compose myself...)

30 “Ohio Star” blocks. 21 individual pieces per block. 630 pieces without the border strips. I’m over the shock. Well, sort of.

I pressed the fabric panels and am ready to go.

First thing to do is get a clean, well squared edge to start. I lay the fabric on the cutting mat and line up the selvage edge with the ruler marks on the mat. Then I lay my clear Lucite “long ruler” on top and line it up with the ruler marks. As you can see, the edge is just a little off – so my first cut is to remove the excess so that I’ve got a perfect 90 degree angle.


I have to cut blocks at 5 ¼ inches (each of these will be further cut down into 4 triangles) and blocks at 4 ½ inches. I’ll start with the bigger ones. I carefully place the long ruler across the fabric at the 5 ¼ mark (using the markings on the mat). The ruler is long enough to extend over the entire width of the fabric and so I can line the other end up with the mat markings as well. This way I know the ruler is perfectly straight and the cut will be at a precise 90 degree angle.

I grab the rotary cutter and.. zip! My first strip is cut. Each strip will give me eight 5 ¼ blocks – so I am able to calculate how many strips I need in order to get the 60 blocks I want.
And so it goes. Measure, cut, measure.

One thing that I noticed early on is that although this process is simple (and somewhat repetitive) it’s actually easy to get distracted and end up cutting strips either too wide or too narrow. So I cut “templates” of the exact block size from paper, and disciplined myself to double check the measurement with the template each time before cutting. More than once I caught myself about to make a goof – and so the little extra effort to double check paid off.

After all the blocks are cut, I pick up the 5 ¼ ones and cut them into triangles. The sharp razor edge of the rotary cutter makes this go by pretty fast because I can chop 6 at a time (more than that and the fabric scoots around while I’m cutting, causing the triangles to be uneven).

At the end, here I am with my 630 pieces:

It took about 2 hours to cut. How long will it take to stitch the pieces into star blocks? Probably eons.