Make Your Own Chevron Print Fabric

I'm going to show you how to make your own chevron print fabric. It's really just a matter of piecing together some fabric squares and rectangles in order to create your own print. And when you start off, we're going to start off with some fabric squares and for your base color we'll call it, you want something kind of neutral, like a gray or a white or off white, or even black, something like that, and then you want to choose a color. So I've gone with this deep kind of plum color to start off with. And you want to put your squares right sides together.

And we're going to draw a line, diagonal line along the middle here, just using a pencil because it's on the wrong side and you're never going to see it and then we're going to pin it on either side, just like I've done here. Now we're going to take it to the sewing machine and you want to sew a quarter inch on either side of the line, okay. So actually I'm going to move my needle position, so that the line of my presser foot here is in line with this line that I just marked and then my needle is a quarter inch away. So I need to adjust slightly. Perfect.

All right. Back stitch a little bit. Back stitch again, cut the threads. Now, we're going to do that on the other side, and this is actually a little bit less than a quarter of an inch, which is fine. You just want to make sure to have the exact same seam allowance for every piece that you're doing.

And I really just like to have this guideline here. I love that this foot has this red marking in the center that I can follow. Backstitch, cut my threads. Perfect. So now we've sewn on either side of that.

Here I have it in black thread so you can see it a little bit better. Now we're going to cut along the line that we drew originally. And now just like that, we have two pieced squares. So you don't have to mess with cutting all these little triangles and piecing them together and having them all perfect, you can do it this way and you can see, you need to give this a really good press. So I'm pressing toward the darker fabric so that you don't see anything on the lighter side.

Okay, and then we want to trim off our little seam allowances. Okay, there you have it. So you want to do this, oh, at least eight times or, you know, of course, however long you'd like your chevron piecing to be. If you're making a quilt, of course, you might be doing this 50 times or something like that. So you may be, you know, doing this repetitive motion but this does make it a little more streamlined to do it this way.

So then once you have all of your pieces that you're going to use, it's a matter of arranging them in the chevron pattern. And this is where you can really have fun with it. Using my little cheat sheet here, you just match up your colors like so then you can see your chevron pattern if I were doing this correctly starting to take shape, there we go. And you would just go all the way down the line, and here's your chevron right here. So our dominant line is this plum color.

Here you can see, I've pieced all of these together and I've got this pink color going on. So in order to piece them together of course you want your little corners to match up just perfectly like this, so you don't mess with the design at all. So what you want to do is piece them together in rows first and then join the rows, lower edge to upper edge. So you can see here how that has been done, pressing as you go, absolutely essential. So all of these match up perfectly.

Now you can use your strips in a number of different applications, like I said, you could make a big quilt, you could, you know, have different colors going on of the chevron, you could, of course use the same color throughout really have fun with it. You could make a really long strip and put it on the hem of a skirt and then just construct the rest of the skirt according to the pattern or however you're making it. It would make a really, really cute bag, and I happen to have one. This tote was made using strips of those chevron piecing rectangles and it's really cute as you can see. We also incorporated one of those strips along the backside to coordinate with the handle, and that's kind of cool.

And then after it was pieced there's just a little top stitching to accent that main chevron color, just kind of a cute little detail. So this bag is just a couple of rectangles, you cut the lining the exact same dimensions. It has a little bit of fusible fleece inside to give it a little bit of loft, which kind of goes along with a little bit of quilty theme that's going on. You could also use some lightweight batting and adhere it to either side with some temporary spray adhesive and it will act just like fusible fleece. And it's just sewn together really simply with the lining completely concealed and the handles inserted between the lining and the outer pieces.

And I kind of wanted this bag to have a little bit more shape and to incorporate a gusset into the bottom but it would have interfered with this chevron pattern here, so in order to not interrupt that, we just left it as some rectangles. And this is where you can, like I said, really have fun with it and change out your colors of the chevron, or you could do an ombre effect and have maybe a light purple going into a darker purple would be really pretty or blue or anything that you like. And you can see how it can dramatically change just based on your fabric preference. And in my experience, you don't really want to go with a print fabric as one of your chevron lines here but you could certainly try that out. I would go with a print that's on the smaller scale rather than a large scale print, just so that the chevron is really becoming the fabric print and you're not competing with anything already existing.

So now you have a great tote bag where you can showcase your very own fabric print.