How To Square Up Quilt Fabric

This is an interesting new-to-me tip that I learned this weekend from a more experienced quilter (thanks, Carol!) in one of my guilds, Quilters Anonymous. There are a few different ways I’ve seen to square up quilt fabric. One way I’ve often seen is to tear it along the width of fabric (i.e., the end that gets cut at the quilt shop — not the selvage edge). One downside of that is then you’re left with a kinda wavy wonky edge that you have to cut off or get to lay flat again. So here’s another tip I’m going to try to see if it improves the accuracy of my piecing.

Step 1: Get your piece of fabric and lay it on the cutting mat. You could do this for a whole width of fabric. I got a small piece for this example to be able to take photos more easily.

Step 2: Start pulling the loose threads along the width of fabric. Look for the single thread that runs along the whole piece of fabric. Here’s a close up of want you want to get. In this piece, it causes about 1/8" of difference!

Step 3: Once you have that exposed thread, get your rotary cutter and carefully cut the fabric along that entire length. No, I didn’t use scissors to cut this, they were just hanging out on my cutting mat.

Step 4 (last step)! Your fabric should now be square — the selvage edge and the edge you just trimmed should be at right angles to one another. If they’re not, then gently stretch the fabric along the bias, from corner to corner and then continuing until it’s all been stretched equally. Press and lay it on your cutting mat to confirm that the selvedge edge and the cut edge are at a 90-degree angle to each other.

I’m looking forward to trying this out on my next quilt and seeing if it improves the accuracy of my quilting! Would love to hear your thoughts or if there are other techniques for squaring up fabric that work well for you.