ModBox QAL – Week #2 – Decide Your Fabric Order and Precut

Hello!  And welcome back to the second week of our super fun new quiltalong: ModBox!

This week is all about deciding the order of your fabrics and then precutting.

By now you should have your fabrics selected for the color blocks, and also chosen (2) fabrics for your background. If you are just joining us this week, please refer back to Week #1’s ModBox Up QAL blog Post right here.

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COMPANION VIDEO –
Each week of the quiltalong, I always post a companion video and this week is no exception….If you’d like to view this week’s companion video to Week #2 of the ModBox QAL, view it here:

DECIDE YOUR COLOR ORDER:
Before you can begin precutting you need to decide what order you want the fabric within the colored blocks to appear. This will be the order they appear going down the first vertical row, and the order will repeat over and over again as you make the blocks. See page 1 of the ModBox pattern for more information.

There are no hard and fast rules here – anything goes and it’s whatever looks pleasing to your eye.

Keep in mind that the border strips around each colored block will be the next fabric in the order…meaning Fabric A’s block will be bordered with Fabric B’s strips and so on….

Here’s a couple hints to help you decide your order:

You could go in color wheel order – that ALWAYS works and is so harmonious! You don’t need to start with yellow either – can start from any color on the color wheel and just go round!

You could start with your lightest value fabric and then place others fabrics in order of value from lightest, to medium to darkest;

You could randomly select your first fabric and then look for the largest or strongest color in Fabric A and select that color for Fabric B and so on….That’s what I did when deciding upon my order!

If you are using a prepackaged fat quarter bundle, you could simply use the order in which the fat quarters are in the bundle. Fabric companies spend a lot of time and effort deciding upon the order of the fat quarter bundles to create the most pleasing arrangement and most of the time, it works perfectly!

Regardless, once you have decided upon the order of your fabrics, label the fabrics in order starting with A, B, C D and so on…..

You should also create a color key for yourself by snipping off a 1″ square of each fabric and stapling it to a piece of paper and writing the letter next to it. You will not need to label your background fabrics….

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PRECUT YOUR FABRICS:
Following the cutting directions for the size of quilt you are making on pages 1-2 in the pattern, precut your colored block fabrics and your background fabrics.

ORGANIZE YOUR BLOCK FABRICS:
The last step for Week #2 is to pair up colored blocks with border strips – refer to page 2 for more information. Simply though, take all of Fabric A’s blocks and place them with Fabric’s B border strips, Fabric B’s Blocks are placed with Fabric C’s border strips and so on….

Once complete, you are ready for Week #3 where we piece the block!

That is it for Week #2! I’ll be back next week for Week #3 – where we will begin piecing the blocks together !

Thank you for following along and until then, happy colouricious quilting! L&C xxoo