Three key tips to make flippy corners, aka snowball corners

By Gretchen Keller

While walking around your local quilt shop or scanning online images for inspiration, it won’t take you long to find quilts that include flippy corners. In fact, several of my own quilt designs use this technique, including Mabel’s Morning Mocha. Here are my top three tips to get better results: 

1)     On the back side of the flippy corner fabric, be sure to use a ruler to mark a diagonal line from corner to corner. Don’t be tempted to skip this step. It can be hard to sew a perfectly straight line by just eyeballing it. And, this marked line is needed in the next tip. 

Flippy/snowball corner step 1

2)     Once the flippy corner is in place and you are ready to sew, instead of sewing right on the line itself, stitch just next to the line on the side that will be trimmed away.

Flippy/snowball corner step 2

3)     Before trimming the excess, first press the flippy corner, taking care to align the raw edges with the fabric underneath it. This guarantees the flippy corner is squared up and positioned where it should be.

Flippy/snowball corner step 3

Since using these three simple steps when making quilt blocks with flippy (snowball) corners, I am now spending less time having to trim each block to square up the edges. Give it a try and let me know how your flippy corners turn out.