How to Cut a Riley Blake Quilt Kit with your Cricut Maker

This tutorial shows you some tips and tricks on how to cut a Riley Blake quilt kit with your Cricut Maker.

Today I’m going to be talking about how to cut out your quilt with the Cricut Maker. Last week I talked about choosing a quilt kit and quilt pattern. This week we’re going to get this party started and start making the quilt.

The first thing you want to do is pull out the fabrics from the kit that you don’t need to cut yet. Such as the binding fabric or the border fabric since you won’t be cutting those with your Maker. I am using the Comfort and Joy quilt kit.

The Riley Blake quilt kits are a great place to start if you are new to quilting. They make it simple because they come with all the fabric you need to piece a quilt top in a coordinating selection. You just open the kit and get started cutting.

Next, decide which print corresponds with which number on the quilt pattern. You can label them either by sticking or pinning a number to them, I like to use Post-its, or you could cut off a little scrap of fabric and put it on a cheat sheet with all the numbers.

For The Maze Throw, on the first page of the PDF pattern, there is a diagram of the quilt with different colors representing the different fabrics in the quilt. There is also a numbered fabric key. I looked at the diagram and chose corresponding prints based off of how many times the large block appeared.

For example fabric numbers five, six, seven, eight, and ten have large blocks appearing five times. Fabrics four and nine have large blocks appearing two times. So I chose the prints that I liked the best for the ones that appear more often. You can also just randomly assigned the number to the fabrics. Whatever you choose to do.

Next, you want to make sure that your fabrics are 12 inches wide. All of the prints that are 1/3 yard cut are already 12 inches wide. While you are cutting them down to 12 inches wide or even if you are using a third-yard cat, in order to prep them for the mat you will need to cut off at least one of the selvage. The selvage is the finished edge on either side of the fabric. This way all of the fabric on the mat is usable fabric. You don’t have to cut the fabric down to 24 inches long. You can have fabric hanging off the back of your mat. It’s no big deal. The machine is only going to use the fabric that’s on the mat.

Last week I talked about the Cricut rotary cutting mat and acrylic ruler. The acrylic ruler is 12 inches wide so it’s perfect for cutting the 12-inch strips. It makes it super easy. The mat also has lines at the 12-inch measurement to help you cut your fabric down more easily.

If you want to start with pressed fabric you can totally do that. Although, the stickiness of the cutting mat allows some leeway in that. Sometimes I iron and sometimes I don’t. It depends on how creased or wrinkled the fabric is and if I’m feeling lazy.

When I do iron I like to use the Cricut EasyPress because it’s so much bigger than a traditional iron. And it can maintain temperature so it makes it nice for pressing fabric. I laid a towel out on my table so that I could press a large section of fabric at once.

To cut your quilt you’re going to take a 12-inch strip of fabric and put the print face down on the pink fabric grip cutting mat. If you pressed the fabric then it’s probably fine with just a firm hand application. But if you did not and there is any sort of wrinkles or crease in the fabric it’s a good idea to use the brayer to smooth it out. The brayer is also great for when your mat is starting to lose its stickiness. It helps the fabric really grab onto the mat.

Then you’re going to want to make sure that you have chosen the corresponding mat to cut. They have made it really easy by having the mats the same colors as the fabric colors in the PDF. They are numbered differently because white is mats one through five and on the PDF pattern white is fabric number one.

Make sure you have the rotary blade in the machine. It’s my favorite blade. It does amazing work. Load the mat into the machine and press the Cricut button.

The Maker does all the work and you get beautifully cut quilt pieces. They have perfectly squared corners. No wonky cuts here.

While a mat is being cut I picked and preped the next fabric by making sure the selvage was cut off. Then I would trim the extras off of the leftover fabric from previously cut mat to put the remaining scrap in my fabric stash.

When the Cricut is done cutting just eject the mat from the machine. I like to peel the negative fabric off first. It’s always like magic. I’m looking at the mat thinking did it really cut it? Then I pull the negative space off and the pieces that I cut are left there on the mat.

Then I carefully take the quilt pieces off. I like to use the large fabric tweezers from the brayer kit or spatula from the Cricut weeding toolkit. You want to touch your mat as little as possible with your hands. The oils from your hands will reduce the longevity of the stickiness.

I find the peeling a piece up from it’s longest side greatly decreases the amount of unraveled threads.

Stack up all the pieces in their own little print family piles and place the number of the fabric on top. This helps to keep your quilt all sorted out until you are ready to sew.

Stay tuned to see how this quilt turns out. If you’re following me over on Instagram you’ll get live updates as I’m working on it.

Check out my other Cricut posts.