Make a Unique Quilt Block with ScanNCut

Brother Crafts Blogger

One of the quilt guilds that I belong to is gathering 100 Ruby Red Blocks.  The basic idea is to create a small quilt or quilt block -- made up of red and white fabrics only -- which will be attached to a canvas.  Each of these blocks will be sold at the show to benefit the guild.  I decided to spend an afternoon putting mine together. I started by creating an owl file by importing a free clip art design (just do a web search for "free owl clip art" to find your own owl!) into ScanNCutCanvas.  I edited the file and pulled apart the various pieces of the owl so that I had a series of shapes to cut.

The process is similar in this video:




As you can see, my pieces didn't all fit on the mat, so I ended up cutting the pieces in several passes.  This was a fine choice because I needed to use a bunch of different fabrics to make my owl. I first cut some commercial fabrics:



The ScanNCut did a great job cutting out all those little pieces for the owl.  However, after looking at it, I decided that I had cheated.  There were blacks and golds and nothing was really white except for the background.  The problem was, I just didn't have enough red fabrics....what to do? I could have gone shopping, but you know how it is when you're in the middle of a project.  Who wants to leave the house?! So, I painted some plain white fabric with red and white paints and cut out my owl parts once again:



Much better! I even painted some white-on-white fabric pieces and pieced four patterns together to create my background:



Then, I did a bit of raw edge applique and added some borders of commercial fabric, according to the guild instructions for the blocks. You can see the stitching a bit more easily in this photo:



I think it turned out super cute!  The painted fabric makes this project totally "me."  And the ScanNCut made the whole thing quick and easy.