#Electric quilt 8 sashing how to

ItвЂ™s simply wonderful planning and works so well with the quilt. And the sashing is pieced! Three strips of fabric form the vertical sashing and some of the cornerstones are tiny nine-patches that work with the pieced sashing to form a secondary pattern on the quilt. Not only is it set on-point, it uses sashing as well as setting triangles. In my opinion, this little quilt is just wonderful. Remember this little quilt that we talked about earlier this year? And this opens up all kinds of possibilities for your quilt. My favorite excuse for using wide sashing is this: The sashing strips can become blocks themselves. Sometime paired with second, darker colored fabric, the blocks will even appear to have a shadow. The wider sashing also gives the illusion that the blocks are kind of floating. The wider sashing gives these blocks room to вЂњbreatheвЂќ вЂ“ thereвЂ™s enough space between the blocks that even if the colors donвЂ™t exactly coordinate, the wider sashing along with some colorful border fabric will work to pull the quilt top together. Scrap quilts or quilts made from orphan blocks (blocks left-over from other quilts, blocks вЂњgiftedвЂќ to you from friends that decided they didnвЂ™t like them or didnвЂ™t want to finish a quilt, or other random quilt blocks) often look best with wider sashing. However, I do realize that that not everyone likes narrow sashing and not all quilts look good with skinny sashing. Pieced cornerstones are not only a great way to pull the colors together in the quilt, but they are also a great way to use up left-over scraps. My personal favorite cornerstone pattern is a nine-patch block. The cornerstones can be solid pieces of fabric, or they can be pieced, like tiny quilt blocks. They are pieced into the horizontal sashing to meet up with the corners of the blocks. Next question: What are cornerstones? They are squares the same size as the width of the vertical sashing. If I did decide to use a wider sashing with this quilt to show off my long arming chops, I would use cornerstones to keep the quilt top pulled together. The limited color palate is no longer as appealing as it was with the narrower sashing. In my opinion, the blocks lose their effectiveness with a wider width of sashing. But what would happen if we used a wider sashing? For the sake of this illustration, letвЂ™s push the sashing width to three inches.

ItвЂ™s a sweet quilt top that uses two or three colors well and the narrow sashing shows this off very effectively. This is a pattern I came up with using Electric Quilt 8. The blocks are closer together and that narrow sashing adds a real punch to the quilt top. If the blocks are similar вЂ“ either the same pattern or similar patterns вЂ“ and your color palette is limited (my rule of thimble is three or less), a narrow sashing works well to unify the quilt. When is narrow sashing more effective than the wider kind? But if I must sash, I tend to lean towards narrow sashing, one-inch wide, unfinished, so it sets at ВЅ-inch. Except what if youвЂ™re like me, and youвЂ™re not a fan of wide sashing? To be honest, as I mentioned last week, my favorite way to set quilt blocks is on point with setting triangles. ItвЂ™s also wide enough that some serious quilting can go on in those sashing strips to enhance your quilt block. That is a decently wide sashing that can deal with pieced or non-pieced cornerstones.

LetвЂ™s say the pattern calls for 2 1/2-inch sashing strips, unfinished, meaning that when the strips are set into the quilt, they will measure 2-inches. Set that issue aside and letвЂ™s just zero in on the sashing. And as intimidating as that factor can seem, it really is not that difficult to deal with, and we will do just that in a later blog. They will either need to be larger or smaller than the pattern calls for. The first thing to consider is that the quiltвЂ™s border(s) will change. So, what happens when you play around with sashing? But on the other hand, because there is generally always the other hand I may want to change the look of the quilt to suit my tastes a little better. At this point, I always stop and think that on one hand, the quilt designer has put a lot of time and effort on the quilt and there are probably good reasons why the designer has come up with those particular sashing dimensions. If youвЂ™re using a quilt pattern that has sashing, the pattern will tell you how wide and long to cut your strips.

#Electric quilt 8 sashing how to

This week weвЂ™re going to take it a bit further and talk about how wide to make the sashing, how sashing affects the overall look of a quilt, and how to pull off some really impressive sashing tricks. Last week we began a discussion on sashing вЂ“ the strips of fabric between the blocks and rows of a quilt.