Welcome to Quilt with Marci Baker were I will show you the simplest method that guarantee your quilting success.

Today we’re going to be doing tumbling blocks which is also known as baby blocks and downtown, which is known as inner city. These are two very traditional patterns and they are both in my book ABC 3-D Tumbling Blocks and More. If you’ve always wanted to make one of these quilts it is as easy as ABC.

This book is an update from Not Your Grandmother’s Tumbling Blocks and Sara Nephew’s Big Block of Building Block Quilts. It has 16 different projects that are very simple even a beginner can try Cat’s Meow which is a very large tumbling block or smaller blocks such as Tumblers for the Table and in fact Justin, our web guy, this is his very first sewing project. Which he designed and here are all 16 projects in the book.

With our Clearview Triangles we have 6″, 8″, 10″, and 12″ and our Super 60. They are all 60 degree angles. The 10″ Clearview Triangle is the one I recommend if you want to buy one ruler, if you already have the 8″ Clearview Triangle or the Super 60 you could buy the 12″ Clearview Triangle and have a nice complement. It will make these large tumbling blocks in Cat’s Meow. However if you only have a small ruler, we show you in the book how to work with that.

What makes these blocks look 3-D is the different values, having light, medium and dark. Having those three distinctive values is important. Here we have, choosing our light and choosing our dark first knowing how wide of a value range you have and then come back and find a medium. In order to pick values, I have a lot of people who ask for help, this tool here is, it’s a Color Wheel but I call it more of a value tool because it allows me to choose the values that are going to give me light, medium and dark. Let me show you how that works.

So here I’ve chosen three fabrics, and here as I place my color wheel over it , you can squint at it and see that this fabric is lighter or somewhere in between these values in the corner. Then we’re going to move over to our medium and you can see that as we squint that it is darker than this section but it is lighter than this section , which places this larger print in a value down in here. Then we move over to our dark and you can see that we’ve got it darker than the darkest on our color wheel. So I know that I have a light in this corner a medium down here and a dark in the corner. That’s going to make a very good 3-D block.

Let’s start with tumbling blocks once you’ve chosen your light, medium and dark lets sew it with a light and two dark’s and a light with two mediums and we’re going to use these strips, pressing instructions are given in the book, and we are going to cut our angle for the dark combination the point will be up and for the medium combination the point will be down. Then we are going to take and turn this strip, so we can do all of our cuts right handed and we’re going to be turning our ruler around so that the end is lined up. The orange is the Cutting Edge and it catches my ruler at my fabric edge and I can line this up and cut my strip which looks like the following. And that piece then we will cut in half. again we are going to use the rule and we have our ruler point down, line it up here, the edge is there and there and I can cut it in half and I get two pieces exactly same out of that strip.

Now once you have these cut, check against page 110 to make sure you have the right size. So now that we have checked our block, this is our left half and we are going to out our two halves from the opposite stip set and that’s going to give us our block. Don’t sew this together yet or else we are going to have a lot of coasters, instead we’re going to keep them as half blocks and we’ll start laying them out, so we get our blocks the way we want, you can do lots of different options there, as far as layout, you might try on the diagonal, which is the very first quilt that I made using this technique, or stairway to heaven, which is on the diagonal with a mirror image, a very traditional quilt, or a Thankful Harvest which is a random layout and for those of you who would like a real challenge try your radiant beauty which can be either a wall hanging or a queen sized quilt.

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