if you've ever wanted to know what
crumb quilting is all about you're going to all watch today's video hi I'm Kim
Jamieson-Hirst of chatterboxquilts.com. I'm the creator of The Quilter's Way, an
online quilt club where members learn and grow in a fun and supportive community.
now before we get into the "crumby" details of today's video, I'd love it if
you'd subscribe to my channel and hit the bell so you'll be notified the next
time I have a new video. Crumb quilting you've probably heard people talk about
this. You may have heard it as improv quilting but whatever term you use what
it involves is taking little pieces of leftover fabric and putting them
together to make something. So there's a couple different ways that you can do this and
I'm going to show you both of them in today's video. So, the first way is that
you can take a strip of fabric - so it depends on what kind of fabric pieces
you have but probably most of us have some strips leftover, right? So just take
a strip of fabric and then you're going to add other little pieces to it. So, I've
got a little piece here and I'm going to add this this way, okay, and it doesn't matter if
these pieces are the same size as the strip. You can see that this isn't quite
as wide as the strip, it doesn't matter. Just stick them down and you can either pin
them if you want but I find you really don't need to do that. So, I'm just taking
odd pieces of fabric and putting them on that strip. Now I want to make sure they
don't overlap. I want to leave a little space between them. This is the last one on here.
And if they extend a little bit past at the edge, it doesn't matter. So this
is kind of part of what I call no brain thinking, no brain stitching, I should say
I'm just starting my machine up here and I'm working on my Janome M7 today, my Continental M7
this big machine just in case you're wondering. Then what I'm going to do
is, I'm using a quarter inch seam of course, and I'm going to stitch these
down. So we put them on that strip, right sides together, and now we're going to
stitch them together. Now one's off a little bit here as you
can see so I need to straighten them back up a little bit but you can
do that as you go along just like I'm doing and, if your quarter inch seam
isn't perfect, no worries either. I'll get this last
little guy in here. Alright, let's take this side off here. Let me cut off my
little leader here. Get that over there. Okay, so here's what I've got. Gorgeous,
isn't it? [laughs] Not really but that's okay. This is what we're gonna do next: I'm just
going to cut off the excess fabric there and I'm just going to trim them up here. Not
really trim them up, sorry, cut them apart. I'm not trimming yet, we'll get to
that though, and if I want to, I can cut a little bit of this excess fabric off. Now
some of these pieces that I've cut off here, like this one, I'm going to use that, of
course. I won't use the selvedge. This little guy? Well I think that's a little
small to use for even crumb quilting so away it goes. Now, what am I gonna do next?
Well, a few things. First off, I need to press these open. Now this is kind
of a weird-looking piece here. I'm going to trim that down. That's a
little much, I think, so let me cut that down. I may keep this guy or I may trim
it off a bit too. So, these little pieces I'm trimming off here definitely can use
those for the next round of crumb quilting. So let's take these and let's
go over here and move things around. I've got all these other things I need to use or I'm
going to work on. I can press these open. Now it doesn't really matter which
way I press these: I can press it to the smaller piece, I can press it to the
bigger piece, it doesn't matter. Usually I use a dry iron. Right now I'm just using
the Violet Craft seam roller for demonstration purposes just to get that
down. It works pretty well too. Okay let's be consistent here and I'll press them
away from that, what was originally a strip. So I'm going to do that with all
of my pieces here. The next thing I would do is I want to add them together.
I want to build this unit so I would put them together, probably not like that,
what would be the point of that, but like this, let's say. Build them
together. Now in order to do that I need to have at least
one straight edge. I don't have a straight edge on either of these, that
one's pretty close but you can see it should go up that way, so I would trim
them up. I would just take this, and it doesn't have to be straight that
way, it could be it on an angle. Let's just see. I have it like
that so I could add that on here maybe. So I would put those together and then
you're going to get something that looks like this. So I've got these
little guys, you can see these ones came off, these ones here, came off the same
strip because there's that same fabric. Then I could take these ones and I
could put them together or I could, if I wanted to, actually I'm going to use this one
here, I could if I wanted to, add them to another strip. So I could put them on
here, say, both of them and I could sew them here and start building it in that
way if I wanted to. Basically, you're starting off with a strip and adding pieces
to it and, as I say, as you continue building ones along the strip, you could
put them together like this. And then you put these together and then
you'd have eight pieces and then you have other eight pieces that you join
and you just keep building, building, building on those. So that's one way
of doing that. Another way of doing that, I'll just grab some of my fabrics here and some
of these here that I had as offcuts, is to start sewing these pieces together.
I'm trying to look for some little smaller pieces so you can see how that
would work. So let's say I take these two pieces here and I put them
together. I know it's small pieces but that's okay. Just think of how many
little pieces of fabric you can use by doing this. If I've got other pieces
I want to put together, I'm looking for little tiny pieces, I want to show you
little tiny pieces, I can actually put them together. Let's try these like this. All righty, so I know these are so small but that's the fun of it. You can just
stick whatever you want together because when you have all kinds of small pieces
of fabric and you put them together you know what? They don't have to be the same
colour or anything. They all just work really well. I've got these little
bitsy pieces here [laughs] They are little tiny pieces, aren't they? So I do the same
thing. I'd come over. I would give them a little bit of a press there. You can
see that in this particular one especially, it's really obvious, that I've
got that extra piece of fabric there. Don't leave your roller on an inclined
surface, it'll roll right off! So I would trim this up again and then I
could put these guys together and I could put other pieces on here. If I
wanted to, I could put other strips along there. I could actually take other pieces
that were put together before if I wanted to, use some of those. Keep adding them to
them. You can actually start with just all different kinds of little
pieces of fabric or little fabric crumbs and put them together. Now, that's fine
and dandy, but what am I going to do with those things when I'm done? Well, there's
lots of things you can do with them, of course. You can use them as blocks. So you
can make it as big a piece as you want, you can make a huge fabric piece if you
want, and then you could cut them into blocks. They don't have to be square
blocks. They could be triangles, whatever you want to cut them into, but something
to use to piece into a bigger quilt block, let's say, to put into a top. Or you could
actually cut them out and use them as appliqué, they look pretty cool like that
as well. So, lots of different things you can do with that but if you've got small
pieces of fabric, don't necessarily throw them away, you don't have to. You can use
them and put them into a crumb quilting project. If you wanted to, you
can make this just on one huge big crumb quilt: don't even cut it into blocks, just
keep making this huge piece of fabric, trim it to whatever you want it to be at
the end. I can't imagine doing this but you could do that, you could have a lap
size quilt. You could have a wall hanging, a mug rug, table runner, whatever you want
to make with it, you can do that. It's a way of taking your scrap pieces and
repurposing them, reusing them into a new project. Thanks so much for watching
today. If you like this video, give it a thumbs-up and be sure to share it with
your quilting friends and if you want more helpful quilting information, go to
my website chatterboxquilts.com.
