4 Tips for Perfect Pre-cut Quilt Patterns: Getting it all to Fit
- Jan 24
- 7 min read
If you're a quilt pattern designer looking to dive into the world of pre-cuts, you’ve probably experienced the unique challenge of working with smaller, pre-cut fabric bundles like layer cakes, charm packs, and jelly rolls. These precuts are loved by quilters because they're a convenient way to get lots of variety, but designing or adapting a quilt pattern to fit these formats can be tricky. This is particularly true when it comes to the math involved.
In this guide, I'm going to cover 4 tips for successful pre-cut patterns. Whether you’re designing a pattern from scratch or adapting an existing one, these tips will help you streamline your process and create beautiful, easy-to-follow patterns that your customers will love.
Table of Contents
Pre-cut Types Available
Before diving into the tips, it’s important to understand exactly what pre-cuts are and why they are so popular among quilters. Pre-cuts are bundles of fabric that come pre-cut (duh) into specific shapes and sizes, saving quilters time and effort in measuring and cutting fabric themselves. They also usually come from a single fabric line so the color palette is perfectly balanced and you get lots of variety, without having to buy yards and yards of fabric.
Common pre-cuts include:
Layer Cakes: 10-inch squares, usually 42 pieces per pack.
Charm Packs: 5-inch squares, typically also 42 pieces per pack.
Jelly Rolls: 2.5-inch strips, generally 42 strips per pack.
Fat Quarters: 18” x 21” cuts of fabric usually bundled into packs of 8-30 prints.
Fat Eighths: basically half a fat quarter, 9” x 21” cuts of fabric in bundles of various quantities.
While fat quarters and fat eighths offer more flexibility similar to yardage, the smaller pre-cuts like charm packs and jelly rolls present unique challenges when it comes to designing quilt patterns. In this blog post, we'll focus in specifically on working with layer cakes, charm packs, and jelly rolls.
The difficulty in working with these pre-cuts lies in making the math work so the pattern fits neatly into the pre-cut dimensions without excessive cutting or waste. This is why many designers shy away from writing patterns specifically for these smaller pre-cuts, despite the high demand for such patterns. However, if you put in the work and write a thoughtful pattern that utilizes pre-cuts well, you might just have a viral pattern on your hands because quilters LOVE them.
Tip #1: Planning is Key—Design with Pre-cuts in Mind From the Start
The most important advice when working with pre-cuts is to plan your design with these pre-cuts in mind right from the beginning. Many designers make the mistake of creating a design intended for yardage first, then try to adapt it to fit pre-cuts like layer cakes or charm packs after the fact. This approach leads to lots of frustration for you and often weird instructions and awkward cuts for your reader; neither of which is good.
Instead, before you do any math or put pen to paper, start by asking yourself:
What kind of fabric options do I want to offer with this design?
Do those fit on pre-cuts?
How many pieces come in a typical pack and how will that influence the quilt size?
How can I design blocks and units that maximize the use of whole precut pieces so my reader isn't having to cut down pre-cuts before sewing (since that's kind of the whole point)?
By thinking about your fabric choices and the pre-cut format before finalizing your design, you give yourself the opportunity to make tweaks to the design that will make writing and sewing the pattern MUCH easier. You will end up with a pattern that uses pre-cuts seamlessly.
As a ghost writer, I've frequently had to retrofit yardage designs into pre-cuts and it's a nightmare. Usually, I have to make recommendations to my client to tweak the design so that the math works and the pattern is more user-friendly. You end up with a lot of sunk time (and cost, since time is money) and the whole process becomes pretty frustrating for everyone involved. I don't want you throwing up your hands and giving up on the whole pattern. Make life easy on yourself and design with pre-cuts in mind from the start.
Tip #2: Use Whole Pre-cut Pieces Whenever Possible
One of the biggest draws of pre-cuts is that they come pre-cut, which means less cutting and measuring for your reader. To honor this advantage, your pattern should use whole pre-cut pieces as much as possible, rather than requiring your reader to trim down or resize most of the fabric squares or strips before even starting.
Sterling Quilt Co.’s quilt pattern Take Me to the Magic is a good example of this. It's a design that could use 5" charm squares as the basis for many of its blocks. The design allows quilters to use charm packs directly without cutting down all the squares, which preserves the pre-cut convenience.
Why is this important? Because if your pattern requires quilters to trim every square down from 5 inches to 4 1/2" inches (or some other size), it defeats the purpose of using pre-cuts in the first place. Pre-cuts save time and effort by being ready to sew, and your pattern should reflect that by optimizing the dimensions to use the precut sizes "as is."
Tip #3: Consider Alternate, Less-efficient Assembly Methods
Most quilting shapes can be made with multiple techniques. Often, as pattern-writers, we'll choose the most efficient one, but when working with pre-cuts, sometimes it's worth consider alternate, less-efficient methods instead so that the pieces fit better on pre-cuts, or pre-cut packs are utilized more completely.
Half square triangles (HSTs) are a good example of this. The traditional 2 -at-a-time method for making HSTs requires cutting squares larger than the finished size to allow for seam allowances and trimming. For example, if your finished HST is 5", you'll have to cut 5 1/2" squares to make the HST, which means you often can't use the pre-cut size directly. If you're using jelly rolls, you'd need 3" wide squares to make matching HSTs. If you're using charm squares, you'd need 5 1/2" squares to make matching HSTs. How do you get around this?
This is where the stitch and flip half square triangle method comes in handy. Instead of the two at a time method, you can create HSTs one at a time by stitching directly on the diagonal line and flipping the corner piece over to form the triangle.
The tradeoff is that you only get one HST at a time, so it can be a bit slower than the 2-at-a-time method (or 4-at-a-time or 8-at-a-time methods). However, the time saved by not having to cut down all your pre-cuts (or add in a fat quarter or yardage just for the HSTs) more than makes up for that.
Using the stitch and flip method allows you to keep your pattern fully pre-cut friendly, which, after all, is the whole point.
Tip #4: Optimize the Most Common Quilt Size to Utilize Whole Pre-cuts Packs
Pre-cut packs come in specific quantities, so when designing your quilt, it’s important to optimize your pattern sizes based on those quantities. This prevents your reader from having a pile of leftover pieces that go unused. If you have more than one size included in your pattern, often, it's hard to optimize all sizes to utilize a discrete number of pre-cut packs. In those cases, make sure the most common quilt size is optimized to use a whole number of packs.
For instance, if your pattern includes a baby, throw, twin, and queen size, optimize the throw size to use as close to a whole number of pre-cut packs as possible, and let the other sizes land how they land. For less common sizes like baby, queen, or twin, it’s okay if you end up with a fractional pack requirement (e.g., one and a quarter packs), since those sizes are made less frequently.
Optimizing the most common size in your pattern for whole pre-cut packs not only simplifies the math for you as the designer, but also makes the pattern feel seamless and “made for pre-cuts” for your customers. This professional touch improves the user experience and can increase the success of your pattern.
If you can't manage to get everything onto a discrete number of pre-cut packs, consider including suggestions for what do do with the leftovers. You can get creative by using those leftover pieces for binding or accents, especially with jelly rolls. A scrappy binding made from leftover pre-cut strips is a fun, cute finish.
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t written a pre-cut friendly pattern yet, consider giving it a try. It might feel like a puzzle at first, but the payoff is huge. Quilters love pre-cut patterns because they are easier to follow and require less prep work. Plus, pre-cuts provide a fantastic way to achieve a scrappy, coordinated look without the hassle of yardage shopping and cutting.
Beyond these four main tips, here are a few extra pointers to keep in mind when working with pre-cuts:
Consider Fabric Variety: Pre-cuts often come from single fabric lines, ensuring fabrics coordinate well. This makes scrappy quilts using pre-cuts look cohesive and beautiful without any effort, but it can also mean that you have to be specific with placement instructions to make sure variety is equal throughout the quilt.
Keep Instructions Clear and Simple: Because pre-cuts are marketed as easy and convenient, your pattern instructions should reflect that simplicity with minimal cutting steps and clear diagrams. If you're having to try really REALLY hard to force the pattern to become pre-cut friendly and the pattern is now 25 pages long as a result, that might be the universe trying to tell you that this quilt just isn't meant to be pre-cut friendly and that's OK.
By designing with pre-cuts in mind and considering all these rules before you finalize the design, you’ll create patterns that are both a joy for you to write and a joy for your reader to sew.
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