When you have your fabric for a quilt chosen and ironed, then you're ready to cut it up into pieces. The first step of cutting fabric is squaring up your yardage.
Squaring up fabric is super simple, yet so crucial to get precise cuts. Here's how you do it:
- Line up the fold of your yardage along one of the lines on your cutting mat. For cutting yardage, I recommend using the largest mat you have. Mine is 24" x 36" and I lay the length of the yardage along the 36" side of the mat.
- Place a quilting ruler perpendicular to the folded edge and align it with the line on the cutting mat. There should be a little bit of raw edge from both layers peaking out from the ruler. In order to waste as little fabric as possible, I usually line up my ruler as close to the raw edge as I can, while still making sure the ruler doesn't overlap any of the wonky raw edge.
- Use a rotary cutter to trim off that raw edge making it clean and straight!
That's it! Now your fabric is squared up and ready to be cut and subcut into quilt pieces.
TIP: After every few width-of-fabric cuts, I recommend re-squaring up the yardage. After cutting a few strips, that straight raw edge tends to get a little off again. Squaring up that edge every now and then, especially when you have a long yardage piece, will help ensure you get the most accurately cut pieces.