Patchwork Help, Advice, Tips and Tricks

Fussy Cutting

Fussy Cutting is another of those strange terms used in patchwork. It makes sense when you know what it is but does sound rather odd.

Think of a printed piece of patchwork fabric with a design of flowers. Suppose you want a specific flower from that design in the middle of some of your patchwork squares. To achieve this you will need to cut out your patchwork piece with that particular flower positioned in the centre so that when your patchwork is assembled the flower will sit well in each patch.

Fussy cutting applies to any part of the design cut out around a specific part of the pattern to be used in the patchwork project.

This can sometimes apply to printed border stripes produced by manufacturers within their fabric collections. These border stripes may split into 4 bands of the design repeated across the width of the fabric. Within those bands there may be two or three different parts of the design. If these are fussy cut then you could create different narrower borders around your project from within the one length of fabric.

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