Squaring A Quilt With Lasers
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Once a quilt has been quilted, it's time to trim the excess sandwich in preparation for finishing the edge. This is the position I found myself in after finishing my newest creation, Echoes of Time and Magic, earlier this week.
Assuming the quilt is a square or rectangle, trimming the excess requires measuring the dimensions and using a straight edge/rotary cutter combo to cut away the unwanted portion. The hard part for me — especially on large quilts — is making sure my quilt has four perfect right corners using only a set of straight-edge and square rulers. It's tricky, and I spend a ton of time measuring and measuring and measuring again to get the dimensions absolutely perfect before cutting.
I'm all for using new gadgets to make my life easier, and to that end, I bought two new gizmos to (theoretically) help make trimming Echoes not such a chore.
This device is a square laser line projector, and I purchased two of them. Here is a link to the two I bought, but there are many different brands on the market that should all work just fine for our quilt-trimming purposes. The important thing is that this device projects to laser lines at a 90 degree angle to each other.
As of writing this blog post, the device I purchased is "currently unavailable". Here is a similar product from another manufacturer. And funny enough, the top three comments on this listing are all about trimming quilts.
To use the laser projectors, I positioned them on opposite corners of my quilt.
The lasers crossed each other on the opposite corners, giving me a reference point.
Next, I used my square ruler to make sure the corners where the lasers crossed were perfect 90 degree angles. And I used my straight-edge ruler as a guide for my marking pen to draw the cut lines on the quilt.
And here is the quilt after I trimmed the excess.
Overall, this method was so much faster and easier than what I had been doing previously. The lasers were massively helpful and worth every penny.
One Final Comment
In a quilt show, a judge will quickly check the square-ness of a quilt by gently folding it in half and looking to see if the corners align with the edges all the way down. Here's what I mean:
The red circles call out the corners and how they perfectly match the edges of the quilt. As you can see, this quilt is perfectly straight.
