Crumb Crazy Tutorial

hey everybody good morning dwarf spinster here i thought i would just do a quick little video here showing how i'm making these crumb blocks it's a sort of crazy quilting and improvisational quilting put together not unique to me by any stretch of the imagination there are lots of good tutorials and videos and books out there it's basically crazy quilting and i just wanted to i've had some questions from people who've seen my crumb blocks and i just wanted to show how i do it very quickly you kind of develop your own way of doing things in style so this is a crumb block and it's called crumbs because and i don't know who coined that term but it's wonderful uses bits and bobs that you have left over from other pieces they're scraps but they're smaller scraps and they turn into pretty small these blocks are going to finish at four inches so they're pretty small crazy quilts typically would have have larger ones so i just want to show how i am doing these crumb blocks if you're interested in crazy quilting but you feel a little bit not quite ready to do this improvisational system then you can check out my lazy crazy pattern in my etsy shop if you go to warpspinster.com and go to patterns it will direct you there anyway um this these are the things that i'm going to be using uh i've got a mat a small mat that i keep by my sewing machine so i don't have to jump up and down every other minute although that probably would be healthier for me frankly a ruler this is just a 3 by 12 and then a small rotary cutter that i have it's kind of a spare i don't don't have it over at my cutting table you absolutely can use scissors instead if you don't want to go the rotary cutting route there are improvisational piecers who like to use just scissors and that works really well i kind of actually use a combination of both i also have some crumbs here left over from some curved blocks that i'm making for my wiggle room quilt but i also have some other scraps and bits and bobs that i pulled out of my stash you'll see that some of the bits are larger than others but um it doesn't matter you know there are there aren't rules to this whole thing so let's get started on a crumb block this is just a scrap from i guess i was probably doing some crazy quilting with it and it has four sides it's not a square if you i'm starting from the center and moving out you can also go from a corner and move out but for this one i'm going to start at the center and this is four sides but not a square so the sides aren't parallel and it's not even a parallelogram a rectangle i should say it's not a parallelogram either and it has four sides one two three four it's an uneven shape which i like to start with if you start with the square or rectangle you're basically doing a log cabin block which is wonderful it's one of my favorite blocks but that's not what we're going for today i like to start actually with five sides three sides you you still run the danger that you're going to run into a triangular log cabin which again perfectly beautiful block love it but not where we're going so i'm going to just i like five sides so i'm going to just snip off a side here um in a pinch that could be used in a crumb quilt it's pretty small but so i set it to the side and now all i'm going to do actually these two sides are perpendicular and i'm not wild about that so i'm going to slice that off so i've got this now i've got one here it doesn't matter i could have used either of those as well but i'm going to start with this it's actually a pretty good size center but i'm going to be having seams on on five sides there so now all i'm going to do is start to build out just like i would with a log cabin but it's not going to be that regular shape so i just find a piece that i can put there it's not going to be a perfect fit doesn't matter this is a pretty good sized piece i kind of hate to waste larger pieces on that well let's go with this irregular shape that i have here this piece from a curved block now i always audition the thing about this flip and sew method with crazy quilting is that you may think which you know which direction it's going to go when you fold it off if you're a foundation paper piece or you know this that it tends to go exactly the opposite of what you think when you've got it right side or wrong yes right sides together so i always check to make sure um so if i think say here i want this to line up here i don't necessarily need to but just to show you what i what i mean here now if i audition it and pull it back it does pretty well if i had lined it up this way and gone that way this is what happens so let's start here now let's start on a larger side and i'm going to line this up here it doesn't match up doesn't matter and now i'm going to sew a quarter inch seam roughly it doesn't have to be exact but you want enough there to um hold the seam when you're finished and there's going to be a whole lot of stuff hanging out but that's okay i'm not going to show you my me sewing i'll just edit that out because you all know how to do a seam all right so i've sewed that seam see it better over here and i am now going to press it to one side generally go into the dark or whatever seems to cause the less the least resistance i don't have any seams cross seams in either of these so i'm just going to go this way you can absolutely just finger press or fingernail press or use a wooden press i'm going to use my iron this is my favorite iron nice old doesn't have steam which is okay because i don't use steam so the sole plate which needs cleaning doesn't have any of those holes that can kind of cause problems and it's got a good weight to it not too heavy that it makes me tired but it's enough weight to get the job done this is exactly the kind of iron brand model everything that i my mom had when i grew up and was learning how to sew when i was seven years old so i love this iron all right now the next thing we need to do you can see it's got this really funky shape there's no straight line for me to sew the next piece on so you've got a couple of choices here you can do this with scissors or rotary cutter but i'm going to show rotary cutter so i can now i want to find a way that i can have a straight line to sew the next strip on so i can trim it this way so that i'm cutting off part of this so i can line it up with that side from the center or i can line it up here with this side and lose part of the center you're going to lose fabric just get over it or i can do a completely different line and cut off a little bit of each for this though i'm going to line up with one of the center lines here and i'm just going to trim it now i could alternatively take another piece not trim it yet but just take a piece and it's got a straight edge here or relatively straight and i could just place that across here do a seam here and trim it later totally up to you in fact let's do that this way okay so i'm going to just take it over to my machine and sew it okay so this is stitched i've got this extra hanging out but you can see that i've caught all of it in the seam back here so now i can finger press it press it whatever and press it back and i always press it back before i trim because again this way it looks like oh i can trim it right there and i'll be fine but in fact that's not what i want to do so now i have three pieces i can go back here now and trim it with scissors or my rotary cutter trim that up that's a little more than i'm willing to do on a chrome block some people might use that but that's a little small for me so now i've got this these three pieces together now and we're on our way doing pretty well so all i'm going to do is just keep finding or making new straight edges to keep adding pieces on and i i tend not to do it in this round robin too much because then it ends up being more log cabiny than i like that's an effect that is perfectly fine in crazy quilting and your first few blocks may end up with that absolutely i still do some now and i still like them all right so this one i've i'm going to line it up with this edge on the the center piece and pull that off again that's a little small for me to use again and now i have another edge here i could do or i could do one across here i'm going to go ahead and no i'm not i'm here is let me show something else here i could absolutely cut this here or i have other options here as well let's let's talk about curves if you're first doing this and you're not comfortable with curves then don't build in any curves so here if i didn't want to do a curve i could just cut that off like that if you are comfortable doing curves those can be kind of fun things to do let me see if this curve it actually should fit because these pieces came from the same quilt so that i could then trim that to go along with that curve and it's a pretty gentle curve and you're going to end up trimming some of it off so if it isn't all perfect i'm going to trim that piece so that curve would line up and i could sew that now in this particular piece i could build a curve in anywhere and if you're used to doing curves you know all about this but i could cut a curve there let me just wing it on one here and then also curve a piece there curves are not necessary in crazy quilting or chrome quilts at all crumb quilts you know are kind of let's put something together here we want it to look nice but we don't want to spend a ton of time on it so um i've got this ready to go let me trim that straight i kind of like that curved look and now i've got another edge that i could sew on and then i'll trim off that way you just keep building that way all right let's put one here as one last demonstration i need to start building some purple ends let me do a little purple piece here and you can see that's not straight there and it's it would be okay to use that edge as well i'm always putting the little dog ear there at the end when there's an angle just so that when i flip it back that gives me more real estate to cut into when i make that straight line or that curve or whatever i'm going to do with it in fact if i'm going to do a curve i may pull that out a little more and then i'm just going to sew that and press that back all right so then i could if i were going to do a curve i could add that to the curve now i've got another spot here where i could trim off along that or cut off a little more of the center in order to have more purple and then i would just start building around and around now sometimes you will get yourself into a spot where you have um got to a side and everything is starting to just turn into one long strip so what i've done here instead is pre-pieced a strip and put these together at an angle and then i treat that as just one crumb or one piece that i'm going to add on to it in fact i did this because i wasn't paying attention and i trimmed this to be too small so i had to add something on and i didn't want it to look like just a straight line across there so i angled it a little bit i didn't want to cut off too much of this so i angled that just a little bit and put in a a pieced bit there i could have added more pieces before i used that strip so you've always got that option is to just piece something and then add that in as if it were a single piece of fabric and that's basically it that's all there is to the the crumb quilting at some point you reach the size that you're looking for and you trim it up evenly or if you're an improv piecer you could do them as as uneven on equal sides and then you have even more interest when you put it together you just have to then deal with that those angles as you put it together and you could treat it much as you do the crumbs that's basically it you start with the center piece i prefer to have five sides that aren't parallel no two parallel or perpendicular to each other just an uneven pentas the five-sided figure and then just find a straight edge piece another piece on flip it back may find or make another straight edge piece on flip it back and just keep going around that's all there is to it and it's a lot of fun you can use up scraps and really make some fun quilts that are you because you're using fabrics that you used for other products or other projects so i hope you'll give that a try everyone all the quilters i know anyway have lots of scraps and they're cloning in the closet so it won't hurt you to use some of them for either a larger crazy quilt piece or for a crumb piece like this hey i'm back for a minute as i'm working further on this crumb block i've come up to a piece here that's looking pretty long this one is two maybe i'll do it over here anyway so in order to not have just a long strip of the same fabric i've pieced two bits together and i will sew that so that i have this sort of wide looking seam here that isn't really a y seam so that could add on to that and make it a little less strippy or i could do it over here as well i'm thinking i might do it over here so then i'll just put it right sides together i'll have to flip this however move it wherever i want it to be flip it back now this is not a perfectly straight seam it is such a gentle curve that i could even sew that as a curve i could straighten it out with my ruler and rotary cutter and mat or i could just eyeball a straight line that's going to be close enough in fact it'll add a little interest if it isn't quite straight and then i will also be trimming this before i sew that seam so i just wanted to add that on if you want to add a little interest to a long strip of something just piece it and add that in and here's my finished crumb block crazy crumb block and you can see that i have some fairly large pieces in here in comparison to some of my other blocks as a matter of fact these pieces are reasonably large but i also have a very tiny crumb in here and smaller pieces and i like that for a couple of reasons one just as for some quilts you want to have a variety of scale in the prints on your fabrics for a little more interest so you want a variety of scale in the sizes of the pieces here so that it does i mean that's one of the things that makes it crazy is because it's just unpredictable improvisational and and i really like that but also because when you have a quilt you know when you stand back from it you get an overall big picture view and feel about the quilt but i like to have little bits in a quilt especially in crazy quilts or these crumb quilts little pieces of detail that the eye can find when they get up close it's sort of a little treat for the person who starts looking closer and they're not going to be looking at whether or not your points match here because they aren't going to match isn't that a nice thing about a crazy quote so i'm pretty happy with this block i've got it squared up and it will be ready to add to the mix i wanted to add a little historical note or a name note about crazy quilts which this essentially is there are you can read accounts or people who say that it's because the women who made these in victorian times went crazy making them because there was so much embroidery and beads and all kinds of stuff on it not true nor is it true that this was created uh for some for um women who were in insane asylums at the time it actually comes from that crackling on pottery on the glaze on pottery that you sometimes see on pieces that looks quite a bit like that and on pottery that's called craziness c-r-a-z-i-n-g and so because this resembles that crazing then they're crazy quilts they may have even started this crazy in quilts i i don't know but that as soon as i read that i didn't buy the whole you know going crazy making these quilts so when i found out about the crazing thing it was like oh yes eureka perfect absolutely perfect anyway happy quilting peace out

Channel: Warped Spinster

Views: 46,985

Rating: 4.8089638 out of 5

Keywords: quilts, quilting, crazy quilts, crazy quilting, crumb quilting

Id: qPUrJFg6OXU

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021