 Hi you guys, Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel. It is week two of my Cricut Quilt series and today we are going to see what the Cricut Maker is all about and we are going to cut out our quilt pieces. So my quilt which is a bunch of X's and O's has some half square triangles and some kind of like elongated hexagons. So today I'm going to walk you through how to set up your mats, how to prepare your fabric if there's any preparation that you need to do at all, and then I'm going to show you the Cricut Maker actually cutting out the pieces and then we're going to see what it all looks like in the end. Using the rotary blade that the Cricut Maker has sort of revolutionized, I guess, is going to make sure that all of my cuts are super super accurate, which is helpful when we get to the third video in the series when we're piecing them together because if your cuts aren't accurate then your pieces don't come together and if they don't come together and measure up equally every single time then you will have a wonky quilt and we do not want a wonky quilt. So yeah let's jump right into it. Okay so we are starting this little quilt project the same way we would start any quilt project and that is to wash dry and press all of your fabrics. So I have already gone ahead and done that. They washed up beautifully. The colors are still just as vibrant and wonderful so kudos to Riley Blake for that. If you've never used their fabrics for any accessories or bags or quilts or anything they are really great quality fabrics. Alright so I've got the instructions from Design Space pulled up here and I am making this adorable X's and O's quilt so excited about that very sweet and it is a baby sized quilt so it's going to end up being 35 inches by 45 inches so a little lap quilt. Okay so now we've got our materials to cut and this can seem a little bit confusing I guess because like I don't have a dark yellow fabric or a light blue fabric so one and so forth because I didn't I didn't buy this fabric. I have a different fabric set but what you really only need to look for is the yardage that was provided in the kit. These are going to correspond to any Riley Blake fabric kit that is for a baby sized quilt so that's really all you need to know. So like for example my one yard fabric I have a yard of this white fabric here and then I have two thirds of yard two thirds of a yard and another fabric and then I have all of these third yard fabrics here and then a half a yard fabric so it all matches up yardage wise cool. Alright the next thing you're going to need is a rotary blade hold please a rotary cutter. What you're going to do is you're going to end up cutting down your white fabric because you were sent a full yard and you need to cut it down to be able to fit onto the fabric grip mat which is 12 inches wide and 24 inches long so the first step is to cut your white fabric or whatever fabric you have a yard of into 12 inch width or 12 inch strips and the length of them is the width of the fabric. So you need to open up your white fabric or whatever fabric you have a yard of and you're basically going to cut 12 inch wide strips that's the length of the width of the fabric. I know I'm saying that in like such a confusing way but these are 44 inches wide quilting cottons are 44 inches wide so basically what you're ending up with is 12 inches by 44 inches wide that's what we're going for here. So in order to make that super simple Cricut has these beauties these are our quilting rulers see through although it actually is frosted on the back side which is really nice and they are coincidentally 12 inches wide super super helpful to make this process go by really quickly so you're I'm going to obviously remove everything that's underneath here use my self-healing mat that I've got laid out here and just cut 12 inch 12 inch strips three times I need three of those per the instructions here and then it tells me that I don't need to do anything with the fabrics that came in the third of the yard cuts those will just be applied onto the mat as they are because they are already 12 inches wide perfect and then the third preparation instructions is to not cut out either of the fabrics that were the two-thirds of a yard fabric and the half a yard fabric we aren't going to be cutting those at all today so let me show you how to cut this fabric down and then how to apply to your fabric grip mat okay I've gone ahead and prepared my white fabric and I know you're thinking oh this is 44 inches but your self-healing mat is only 24 inches well another really great trick that quilters use all the time is they fold their fabric in half sometimes more than in half like in quarters I didn't want to go that far I don't want to be that crazy with it and then that way you can make one cut with your rotary cutter and you'll go ahead and get the full length of the fabric so I have laid out my fabric you can see here's the fold and here's the raw edge this is the selvedge edge here because remember we're cutting this the width of the fabric not the length so we don't want the 60 inch side which would represent one yard we want the 44 inch side which represents the width of the fabric okay and now we just cut we're going to do this three times so that we end up with three 12 inch by 44 inch panels and coincidentally this is the Cricut rotary cutter and it is awesome so obviously it comes with like a protective shield like all rotary cutters do and you pull it back to reveal the blade and then you just push this little button and it pops right back out so where it's safe again so super simple and super easy to use um there's a lot of times when I am a bad rotary cutter user and I forget to um push this back in and and and secure the blade again so hopefully having this little button will make that a little bit easier for me to do and I'll be more inclined to do it because it really is super dangerous thank goodness I don't have kids or anybody else here with opposable thumbs okay let's get cutting see perfect right okay let me do the other two okay and just like that in a matter of a few seconds maybe a minute I've got my three panels 12 inch wide by 44 inch long okay and here is our fabric grip mat mat these are the mats that fit into the Cricut maker machine and they come with like a protective film you just want to be super careful because these are a little bit sticky and you really want them to last a long time and not have this stickiness wear off um they last longer than you think they would I mean I've had my maker for almost a year now and I've been using the same mats this whole time I mean some of them are in better condition than others like here's another one that has a ton of little threads but the rotary blade of the maker just really ignores those threads and it does not matter to it at all if they are underneath your fabric um so it's a little bit odd to kind of get your mind off of like being obsessed with having like a super clean mat but it's really not super super um imperative because the machine kind of takes care of that for you but we're just going to lay out our fabric here and we're trying to keep it in line with the grid and keep those little threads um above the above the grid line here because we don't want any of our pieces to get cut with those little threads hanging off that would not make for a very accurate quilt okay so you just lay this down kind of get it going and then you want to smooth everything out like so beautiful okay and you just smooth it out with your fingers and another really kind of odd thing we're going to do is we're going to leave all of this excess hanging off the end this is going to help make the most of our scraps really because this is going to get fed into the machine like the machine is here and gets fed in this way so whatever the machine the machine will be cutting all of these pieces and whatever is not cut into can be your scraps so if i cut this off here at the very end of the mat i might have wasted this much scrap of fabric so it's really um going to be a an effective way to make the most of your fabric i mean these quilting cottons are not cheap you know so you want like make use of all the scraps you can so that you can make other smaller projects so we're going to leave it hanging off the edge now if you are so inclined you can buy multiple fabric grip mats and go ahead and lay out all three of your white fabrics you know you could also buy 10 of them and go ahead and lay out every single fabric that you need that to me is a little bit wasteful because while the second one is cutting you could be replacing um the fabric that was on the first one you know and kind of create like a rotating system so that's what i'm going to be doing here i'm just going to be rotating through each of the fabrics and each of the mats until i get all of my fabrics cut okay and when you've got your fabric all prepared on the first however many mats you have you can go ahead and click make it and you can see that design space is already sorting all of your mats so this is our white fabric or again whatever fabric you have a yard of it may or may not be white um it's already got it on the 12 by 24 inch mat and it's already got three of them in place and then it goes into the other fabrics that you have one third of a yard of um and that will go all the way down to mat number nine it does not matter which color you use for which fabric you have um they're all going to be the same or at least for my pattern the shapes are all the same you can see the cuts look identical on every single mat so it doesn't matter for mine but you can see here on the big mat the preview um all of these half square triangles that it's going to make and then when we get down to our decorative fabric all of these hexagons so it really is going to cut a lot of time from my life and also just make it easier and more importantly more accurate cutting all of those lines even with a rotary cutter is no small task so when you are ready to go you click down here continue it is pulling up my device but I am hardwired so it's going to pull up the maker really quickly and then we're going to pick fabric because that's what we're cutting fabric cotton specifically um and then it's going to read that my tools are all in the right place I've got my rotary blade in we don't need any tool here because we're not doing any marking or anything like that and it's ready for me to go so I am going to set you up on a tripod and do a time lapse because time lapses are so much fun so enjoy this time lapse of my maker cutting out my quilt for me I wanted to show you with the very last piece that I cut out just kind of like what we're dealing with in terms of cutting accuracy and how easy it is to pull it up off of the mat um you can tell it's kind of just releasing itself couple thread snags here and there but you can tell these little hexes come off really easily and you're left with a bunch of these little cute triangles too which could make their own really fun project I mean maybe like um little what are they called like coffee cup cosies or um coasters or something like that um but yeah you can get through pulling this off you know just as quickly as it took you to put it down to be honest um and you get all your hexes removed this one had a bit of an issue on this edge but the others promise do not have this issue but there you go you can just finish it off really easily and just like that you have all of your hexes and um what was it 108 yeah I think 108 um half square triangles all perfectly cut I mean look at that look at that stack I did this in about I guess it was a little like four minutes for each mat so 12 minutes to cut all of these and it was like completely stress-free okay so our next steps um are well you have options don't you love options you can either go ahead and start sewing using the instructions that are provided in a little pdf format here let me get you off of here look how great all of the fabrics turned out so cute perfect um so there are all these instructions very very detailed step-by-step instructions really breaking it down making no assumptions about your quilting ability which is good for me um it really does lay it out piece by piece square by square and then how to put all the squares together and then put rows together we're getting to rows eventually where are the rows I'm telling you detailed instructions here we go here's some rows and then how to attach a row to a row and then more rows and then we'll get to our border so this is option two you can go ahead and cut this three inch by width of fabric so three by 44 um strips of the border fabric that's the one that you've got two thirds of a yard of um you can go ahead and cut those if you want or just get straight to sewing it's up to you I think because I'm a garment sewist I like to get everything cut out all at once so I will show you those I'm going to use the same exact process that I used to cut the um the white fabric using that um quilting ruler um should make it super simple super fast I'm going to fold it in half the same the same exact way that I did it for all my white fabric in the beginning all righty all done with the cutting honestly it couldn't have gone any better couldn't have been any easier and couldn't have been more accurate so if you've never sewed enough quilt before this might be one of the reasons why um I gotta say it was a breeze okay so I know that the Cricut Maker is awesome I've been using it for almost a year now but I gotta tell you the way that it just like knocked out those half square triangles was kind of amazing and while it was cutting I was able to like bounce around and do other things you know it wasn't like all my brain power was focused on making sure that these half square triangles were absolutely perfect each and every time the machine did it for me the hexagons were fun too um it was really cool to see it's always interesting to me even whenever I make garments how a fabric can look one way as yardage and then when you cut it up into smaller pieces it kind of takes on a whole different vibe to me um so I am super excited about the direction of this quilt after seeing all my hexes cut out and seeing the um I guess because the fabric has like a smaller scale print on it um on a bigger cut of fabric it kind of looks like blended in kind of but whenever it's really small all those little details of the design really pop out um and it just makes me appreciate it a lot more and makes me even more excited for what the quilt is going to look like when we actually get it all pieced together so I'm going to spend the next couple weeks piecing together my quilt I will be filming a little bit of the process a little bit of the progress then I've got to send it off to get it quilted because I don't have a long arm quilt machine so it's going to be a couple of weeks before we can get to the third video but we will get there um and I can't wait to show you what it looks like um so until then I will see you all very soon bye