Creating Stripes with Solids Demo

[Music] hi my name is Maria Schell and I'm the author of improv patchwork dynamic quilts made with line and shape published by CNT publishing I think this book has got a lot of new interesting information for quilters out there my background is as a traditional quilt maker that's where I started and I had several teachers who were incredibly focused on craftsmanship and I embody those things in my work I take pride in the fact that I can do precision piece work and that my quilts not only are beautiful but also well-made from there I began to study art quilt making and well in doing that I learned a lot about line and shape and color and composition so the merging of my background in traditional quilt making with the art quilt is resulted in quilts that are surprisingly modern or contemporary and I think that because my work spans all three genres of quilt making that exists today that there's really something for everyone in this book but I like to show you in this video is how I make stripes or at least a couple of the ways there's in the book I think there's five or six different types of stripes that you can make here I'm gonna tell you about ruler made stripes map made stripes and some ways that you might use them a ruler made stripe is something that you've all heard of before a strip set and a strip set is really don't want to show you some strip sets here these are ruler made stripes and what I mean by ruler made is that I used my mat the lines on my mat and the lines on my ruler to cut the fabric as you can tell these are they're super they're static and they're predictable they don't really excite the eye because you what you're looking at is precisely cut to measure the same thing and your eye can tell that and it says oh okay I've seen that before and it moves on but there's a lot lot of useful things you can do with these ruler made stripes show you a couple more here all of them have the you know the blues are all the same size the yellows are all the same size and these can be really fun to play with as is or there's some other things that you can do with them but cut them up some more mix and fun designs so I'm gonna show you how I make a ruler made stripe and a lot of you probably already know this but if there might be a newbie out there that wants this information so we'll start here I like to use the lines on my mat I'm gonna use the line down here and line up the bottom of my fabric this is the fold I want the fold to face me and then I've got my raw edge over here I've got it folded the salvages are up top the fold is facing me and I've got I'm gonna cut with my fabric over to the right and my rulers on the left side so I've lined up the fabric I know that these lines here this is where I'm going to clean up my fabric right lines on the mat lines on the ruler and I'm gonna cut okay I got a nice clean edge say I want two inches you guys thought folks all know this right here so I'm gonna cut a two inch strip now things are gonna change a little bit when we move into what I call Matt made stripes but the Matt made stripe what you're doing is you're using the lines on the mat to help guide you and getting a procs I'm gonna leave the same size piece of fabric you're gonna cut using those lines and no ruler so to do a mat made stripe I'm gonna line it up the same way what I'm doing here I've got this line here and like this line here and I'm gonna use those as my guides I'm gonna get one of the really important things about cutting without a ruler in order to get really beautiful lines is that you need to use your whole body I like this cutter because it gives me good visibility of where I'm cutting my line I'm also as I cut I'm gonna go forward with my line if you kinda like this you're just gonna end up with sloppy pieces of strips of fabric so we're gonna cut see here I've got this line I'm aiming towards that line to give me more or less a straight line as you do this more frequently you can start to vary your line sometimes you'll get this which I call a sloppy cut and I'm going to come back in and smooth it out this takes practice don't use your best fabric when you start out pick some fabric you're not particularly fine that fond of so that you can practicing it better and then go to your favorite fabrics and cut it now the next line and sometimes I will do this depending upon like here we don't really have enough space to do it but I will cut the fabric instead of having it four layers I'm gonna cut two layers it's another way that you can get more control if you're going to cut it that way and you're gonna be looking you're looking to Steve pretend I have a large cutting table so I'm gonna cut same thing I'm gonna follow through moving my whole body smoothing out any sort of lumps that I might have now the next trick really is once you've cut you've got your topic for your fabric that you're going to sew together if I were at home I would earn these creases out I'm really picky about that but we're gonna pretend that crease doesn't exist there all right I'm gonna cut another line moving myself over the fabric you can see how there's some variance in that line it's not exactly it looks like it's about an inch and a quarter here and it's moved down to about an inch here at the bottom that is okay now when you go to your sewing machine to sew these two pieces of fabric together that you have cut without a ruler you've got some wonkiness in it right you want to honor that you don't want to compensate for it so if I what our natural inclination is is if we've cut two pieces of fabric and they're not the exact same size and we want to stitch them together we're gonna go to the sewing machine and we're gonna maybe so like that so this one is a super scant quarter of an inch and this is a regular scant quarter of an inch I don't want you to do that I want you to line them up I like to put the top fabric over my left shoulder because that serves as a tension device I'm going to feed it through the sewing machine and tug on it gently like that all the time at the same time I'm moving the fabric slightly so that it lines up in these both are the same they're at the same edge then you're gonna go to show me your iron and you're going to press them open I usually press them to the side they want to go to and/or the dark side you really don't want to press your fabric to the white side unless you're going to immediately quilt it and so find it and not give it any chance to sort of get these little threads on the edges these are Matt made stripes they're also what I call designer stripes and they are the does the quilts the stripes that I use to make this quilt right behind me for each of these designer stripes and I'll lay these out so you guys can take a look at them right they I tend to put a center color and then I mirror those colors out so for example this one it's pink then we've got white brown white red when I do these sort of stripes I'm gonna make what I call a stripe recipe and these are the stripe recipes for the quilt behind us which is called beachy I'm gonna write this out I'm also going to after I cut my fabrics I'm going to photograph them so that I have these visual memories of what I did to get to that stripe there's a couple reason that I do that is because when you got a bunch of different pieces of fabric it's easy to get confused so you've got a reference and the other thing is if I really like the proportions on that stripe I'm gonna repeat it again and since I've written it down I can do it again and again it's really just a way to keep yourself organized and moving forward so here are some designer stripes and you can I usually piece cut these Salvage to salvage and in this case I just made that each of them there's Salvage to salvage and then I piece them together into one quilt that's one way you can use these pieces of fabric and here are a couple of other ones in this case I took and I cut the these designer stripes into squares and you could go about making four patches or nine patches and this is a good point time to say this that when when you're working without a ruler you need to always make things slightly bigger than you want them to be in the end and you see how the brown is really big here that's because I know I'm gonna cut it down in order for it to fit with other pieces I'm giving myself wiggle room so one of the really important things about working improvisationally is that you you've got to give your some wiggle room because you're doing things without a ruler and I think this is a good point time for me to say but it looks called improv patchwork but in some ways I feel like there should be in parenthesis with intention this is not a book where I just cut things up and sew them back together and say that you know I've done improv this is a book that really thinks thoughtfully about line and shape and color and I'm using all those things very intentionally so back to ideas things you can do with your stripes I wanted to share this with you this stripe if you make a stripe and you end with one color and then you've got a different color on the other end what you can do is you can then cut that stripe I'm gonna do it here so I'm gonna cut it about three inches and I am using my ruler that's another thing is I use my ruler I don't use my ruler I use my ruler I don't use my ruler it's all about what sort of effect I want to get if I want it to be visually stimulating for the eye that is gonna be a long period in the process where I'm not using a ruler but then there's going to be a point where I need to come back in and use the ruler to get things to fit together so I've got a 3-inch stripe here and I'm gonna cut another one so before I have this stripe that's growing long this way right and it's got the stripes going this way now I've cut these and I can stitch them together so that I have a stripe going this way that's that's only three inches wide but is growing longer so it's another way you can use your stripes here I took some Matt made stripes this is basically a log cabin quilt block so I started building my stripes going around my log cabin block it's another log cabin block in the making and then here are here I've taken it's getting a little busy around here these are red and white stripes that I cut and inserted the brown so now I've got stripes going both ways and then I added the orange on the outside this stripe is essentially the same stripe but there's different information in the areas so here I've got red and blue here I've got red and white and it's longer and shorter and then here the stripe going the other way there's brown just brown here but I put brown and yellow stripe there so you start to get all these different variations by just changing one small detail so I hope I hope you've learned some fun things about stripes and this is just the first couple chapters of the book about making prints out of solids from there we talk about polka dots and pointy shapes and zig zags herringbones plaids tracks lattices there's all different types of prints that you can make and then turn them into original compositions [Music]

Channel: CandTPublishing

Views: 19,441

Rating: 4.8273921 out of 5

Keywords: Maria Shell, Improv Patchwork, demo, tutorial, quilting

Id: CDE2oQFj-5A

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018