I was given a couple of boxes of 3 1/2 inch squares recently from my mother-in-law. A few years back she was making these very cute Christmas trees with them and cotton balls, Styrofoam cone and pines, but now she was passing them on to me. I was excited to get what I thought would be a bunch of pre-cut squares to use, however, upon going through the piles of squares I found they were not all the same size. Ugh! To trim these all up with a rotary cutter and mat was going to take some time so I put them aside.
When I purchased my AccuQuilt Go Cutter it came with the value die which has a 4 1/2 inch square, a 2 1/2 square and a 1/2 square triangle that finishes at 2 inches. I got to thinking about it and realized that I could use the 2 1/2 squares on that die to cut down all those uneven squares sitting in the boxes. After looking through my die collection I found the Bow-tie die, and saw that it had four 2 1/2 squares on it making it possible to cut even more of those squares at one time.
That’s one of the great things about the dies, you don’t have to wait until you have the die made to cut several 2 1/2 inch squares, all you need is to own one of dies that has that size on it. As you can see in the photo, I have even out-lined the shape with a permanent marker and marked the size of the squares. This makes it easier for me to see the placement of fabric and what size the square is at a glance.
It doesn’t take too long to trim them down and my fingers are much safer using the AccuQuil cutter vs. the rotary cutter. You may be thinking that there’s a lot of waste but if I had a 3 inch square die to use instead of the 2 1/2, there would have been much less.
Here’s my pretty in pink quilt. I think it came out great! So happy that I was able to find a way to clean up my squares and put them to use. Had I not had this option, I probably would have ended up passing the material along to someone else.
If you would like to learn more about AccuQuilt just click on the bold links. Thanks for stopping by my blog and Happy Sewing!
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