Farmer’s Wife 1930’s Tutorial — Block 69 Mrs Keller

Hello there!  I’m back with anoth­er tutori­al for the Farm­er­’s Wife 1930’s Quiltalong.   Today I’m shar­ing my rotary cut­ting tricks for Block 69 — Mrs Keller.

At first glance Mrs Keller looked like a rel­at­ively simple block to make, its just a few half square tri­angles, easy corner tri­angles and a nine patch right?    But, and its a big but, we’re sew­ing 6″ fin­ished blocks and 6 divided by 5 does­n’t exactly give a nice fraction
for rotary cut­ting the pieces.   I was pretty determ­ined to rotary cut this one though so I devised a little plan using the tem­plates in the book that I hope helps if you decide to make your block the same way.

Here’s what you are going to need:
• Tem­plate plastic
• a ruler (not the good one you use when cut­ting fabric)
• a per­man­ent marker
• the tem­plate sheet from the book, remem­ber to print at 100%

Before I start the tutori­al I wanted to let you all know about a product that I’ve been using that I’ve found makes press­ing all the teeny pieces in the Farm­er­’s Wife blocks so much easi­er.   Last year at Quilt Mar­ket the lovely Brenda from Mar­ti Michell intro­duced me to the Steady Betty team.  Kathy was so lovely and gave me one of these 12″ Steady Betty Black Beauty press­ing boards to try.   It’s abso­lute bril­liant and I’m really not sure how I did without it!     If you see one in your loc­al quilt shop I thor­oughly recom­mend tak­ing a look and grabbing your­self one.     If your loc­al quilt shop does­n’t carry them you can get them online by click­ing here.

Back to the tutorial…

Place the tem­plate plastic on the square tem­plate, make sure you line up the bot­tom and side and then, place your ruler on the oppos­ite side and draw a line that extends well past the square tem­plate shape.

Turn the ruler around and trace off the top of the square tem­plate shape.

Next pop the tem­plate plastic over on the the long tem­plate shape as shown and mark the top seam allow­ance on the tem­plate to make a rectangle.

If you’ve used tem­plate plastic before you’ll know that it tends to slip and slide all over the place, I use small pieces cut from a Ruler Betty strip attach to the back and it really helps!

Cut out the tem­plate plastic ruler you’ve just made and use it to cut strips of each fab­ric (1).   Just a quick note on fab­rics — I’ve used three fab­rics for this block but you only need two if you want your block to be the same as the one in the book.  Cut 8 squares for the easy corner rect­angles as shown in 2.   You can then trim off the square from the tem­plate plastic ruler.  You’ll need it later so set aside some­where safe after you have drawn a diag­on­al line on it as shown in 3.    Cut 4 rect­angles for the easy corner rect­angle borders.

You will also need to cut 3 extra rect­angles of each fab­ric to make the 9 Patch unit for the centre of the block and 2 squares of each fab­ric  1″ wider than the ruler for the half square triangles.

Let’s start with the easy corner bor­der strips.   Start by draw­ing a diag­on­al line on the wrong side of the squares with a pen­cil.   Sew just adja­cent to the line.

Trim 1/4“from the drawn line.

Press and then repeat on the oth­er side tak­ing care to ensure that the easy corner tri­angles are facing the same way (i.e. towards the middle of the block).  Make 4.

Using the extra three rect­angles of each fab­ric sew strips togeth­er to make two strip sets as shown.

Use the tem­plate plastic ruler to cut 1 rect­angle from one of the strip sets and 2 from the oth­er.    Join the rect­angles to make the nine patch unit for the centre of the block.

Last but not least, you need 4 half square tri­angles.   On the back of two of the large squares (1″ wider than the ruler) draw a diag­on­al line on the wrong side of the squares with a pen­cil.   Sew ¹⁄₄″ from the line on both sides.

Cut along the drawn line and then press open.   Grab out the tem­plate plastic square you drew a diag­on­al line on.   Place the diag­on­al line on the join between the two fab­rics and trim around all 4 sides.

All you need to do to fin­ish the block is sew the units cre­ated above togeth­er, I recom­mend hav­ing the book close by to make sure the half square tri­angles are ori­ented the right way.   Don’t be like me in the photo below and have those half square tri­angles around the wrong way!  (And yes, I had sewn the block before I real­ised so had to do some ser­i­ous seam rip­ping before I was able to fin­ish it!)

The Farmer’s Wife 1930s Sampler Quilt: Inspir­ing Let­ters from Farm Women of the Great Depres­sion and 99 Quilt Blocks That Hon­or Them by Laurie Aaron Hird for Fons & Porter/F+W; RRP $28.99 – Click here to pur­chase.

Don’t for­get to stop by these oth­er great blogs for tutori­als com­ing up later this week and next week…

11/02/2016: Angie @ GnomeAngel.com & Mar­ti @ Mar­ti Michell
12/02/2016: Sherri @ A Quilt­ing Life
16/02/2016: Angie @ GnomeAngel.com & Mar­ti @ Mar­ti Michell
17/02/2016: Nath­alie @ Les Ouv­rages de Nat
18/02/2016: Angie @ GnomeAngel.com & Mar­ti @ Mar­ti Michell
19/02/2016: Anita @ Day­dreams of Quilts

It’s been a while since I have shared my block pro­gress so (brace yourselves there are quite a few!) here goes…

Have a great week (and a cof­fee after get­ting through all those blocks!)