Pieced Vehicles – Improv Style

Tractor Tutorial:

1. For this block you’ll need background material, in this case tan, a solid for the body of the

tractor, a small piece for the window, black fabric with white dots for the wheels and funnel, as

well as a small piece of fusible web.

2. Rough cut some of the pieces for the block - an angled rectangle for the window, strips of

green, as well as a rectangle of green for the body of the tractor. You’ll also need strips of

background fabric.

3. Sew a green strip onto the top of the window.

4. Join a green strip on the right and left side fo the window. You can trim the top piece of the

window either before or after joining the side strips.

5. Trim the green strips to ½ inch of the blue window.

6. Sew strips of tan onto the top and sides of the window.

7. Trim the bottom of this window unit straight across.

8. Sew the green rectangle onto the bottom of the window unit. I offset mine to the left slightly.

9. Trim the sides of the block in line with the green rectangle.

10. Add tan strips to both sides of the block.

11. Trim the bottom of the block straight across.

12. Sew a strip of background fabric to the bottom of your block.

13. Now you’re ready to create the wheels. I wanted a large back tire and a smaller front tire, so I

traced two different sized spools of thread onto fusible web. Iron these onto the back of your

black and white polkadot fabric, centering a white dot in each circle.

14. Cut out and iron onto your tractor. Later I will blanket stitch around all the tires with black

thread, giving the effect of tread.

15. Square up and trim your block. At this point I thought my vehicle wasn’t reading very well as a

tractor. The way I tried to solve this was by adding a little funnel/smokestack to the front of the

vehicle (see the finished photo at the top of the tutorial). You could certainly piece this in

earlier when you are making the window unit. However, as this was an improvised solution for

me at the end, I just cut a small rectangle from my black fabric and fused it on.