Hi All, today I have a short tutorial on a super easy quilt block for beginners called the “Stitch and Flip” Technique.

Meet the Stitch and Flip Quilt Block

The stitch and flip technique, also known as the “Quilt As You Go” technique is a quick and dirty quilt block piecing technique that doesn’t give a single care about points matching up, or seams being pressed a certain way. 

This is a great easy quilt block for beginners because it doesn’t use any piecing techniques that require super precision, allowing you to focus on learning the overall process without needing perfect quilting technical skills.

How to Get Started

To get started, grab a piece of light fabric or muslin that is cut 1/2 inch larger than the ultimate size you want you block.

In my case below, I decided on a 9.5 inch square block, so I cut an 10 inch square piece of backing. 

Search through your scrap pile and look for a relatively smaller scrap.

Take washable fabric glue and glue the scrap somewhere within your light fabric square, right side up. 

This is going to be the basis of our block. 

Each block can have a different shaped starter piece which will give your quilt a lot of variation in the blocks!

With this technique it’s rare that any two blocks look the same. That’s totally okay.

Piecing the Block 

Next step, with your pile of scraps you will be using for the quilt within reach, grab one with an edge longer than your beginning piece. 

Put the two fabrics right sides together aligning the edges, and sew a 1/4” from the edge of the fabrics that you lined up. 

Once you finish the seam, head on over to the iron and “Flip” the scrap over and iron her down. 

When you add the next piece of fabric, the only thing you need to do is make sure that it covers the full edge of the fabrics along that edge. 

Some times it may be one fabric edge you are covering, sometimes it may be more! 

Keep working your way around the block until you have stitched and flipped so you can no longer see any of the light square material you started with. 

It will likely look a little messy!

Square and Trim it up

Now that we have all of the stitching and flipping complete, it’s time to make this thing look like a real quilt block. 

Grab one of your quilting rulers and trim up the edges so your quilt block to the size of your original muslin block.

To make it super accurate you can make the muslin slightly larger and trim down to your desired quilt block to make an accurately sized block.

I’m shooting for a 9.5″ inch quilt block so I trimmed mine down to a 10×10″ block. This gives me a quarter inch on each side to connect all of my blocks together for my quilt top. 

The Finished Block

Once you have your quilt blocks all sewn together, you can choose to add borders, or just finish it off as is. 

Related:
Super Scrappy Quilt Reveal

The beauty of this technique is that because it uses a lot of improv and random placement of fabrics and seams, there are no corner or points that are intended to match up. 

No stress with quilt blocks not being perfectly sized, because we can trim off as much or as little as we want to get the perfect square block.

This is a fantastic east quilt block for beginners to use because it allows you to focus on the basics of just how to use your sewing machine, how to add a border, or practicing your quarter inch seam allowance. 

Its the ideal “walk before you run” quilt block that also looks great as a finished quilt!

Now What Do You Do?

Sew your blocks together to finish your quilt top!

You can add borders if you like, or you can just sew the blocks together as is, so feel free to get creative.

If you liked this tutorial and want full patterns to try out your new skills be sure to check out my free pattern vault!