How to Make a String Quilt Block

[Music] hi i'm sheri from a quilting life and today we're going to talk about making string blocks if you're watching on youtube please go ahead and subscribe to the channel and hit like if you enjoy this video and you can also leave comments or questions on the channel or on the blog and today we're going to talk about making these fun scrappy blocks and it will have you never throwing away a scrap again so today we're going to talk about the method i use to make my string quilt blocks and i like to use a fabric foundation you can also use use dryer sheets or thin paper if you'd like now if you use the paper or the dryer sheets you might want to tear that off the dryer sheets you could do either wait complete the background on with this fabric foundation i go ahead and leave it on it makes the quilt blocks just a tiny bit heavier but it really doesn't matter that much in the end so what you're going to do is start out with a square it's a little bit bigger than the one you want your finished block to be so my blocks are half an inch bigger quarter inch on each side all the way around what I do first is I pick two fabric strips now I have quite a collection of fabric strips leftover from other projects I just kind of save them in a bag and when I get a good mix I make a few string blocks I generally like to use strips that are between 1 and 1/4 inches and 2 inches wide some of these really tiny strips you can use but it's going to give you just a really narrow strip when you're finished so so you can see that these strips are all their different sizes but they're not too wide or too narrow so what you're going to do is you're going to put two strips or strings as they're called right sides together on top of your founding apiece and I just make sure I cover both diagonal you know corners and I'm going to sew these with a quarter inch seam on one side once I've done that and see I sewed that seen and I pressed it o to the one side so I've got my center piece and thus and they're sewn all the way through the foundation piece and now I'm just going to keep going I'm going to add strips to this side I'm going to sew impress until I've completely covered my block and I'm going to do the same thing on the other side I'm going to sew strips and press that way until I've completely covered my block so I've continued sewing all of my strips to the piece that I started with and you'll notice that I just use a little square on this side sometimes when you get to the end a square works better than a long string so save your little square pieces of fabric to I used quarter inch seams for everything and my center strip I pressed half of them to one direction and half of them to the other I'll show you what it looks like on the back so you can see all of the seams that were sewn and you can tell that my foundation piece of fabric is completely covered now we're ready for the fun part and we're going to trim and we're going to trim everything up to my square fabric that I started with was six and a half inches I'm actually going to trim everything just to six inches because that's what I started with and I have a bunch of these blocks already made so I'm gonna line the ruler and I'm going to just trim and if there are small pieces that are left over like this I just throw them away and the next side now here you'll see I have a pretty good piece left and so what I'm going to do at this is I'm going to save it I'm gonna just kind of chop it off and I'm going to add this back to my string pile we're going to continue around the edge of the block and then we'll trim up that fourth side and what we have left is a perfect string block and I will come back and I'll show you a little bit about how you can set these together and like I mentioned if you had done this with a an old dryer sheet background you could leave it on or leave it off but if you've used paper you'll want to tear off the paper in between the seam allowances these are great way to use up scraps and they're slightly addictive so we finished making our string block and now let me show you a few things that you can do when you put them together I like to sew them together in groups of four as soon as I get them sewn and you can tell that I've pressed the seam allowances open on the back this is going to give this pattern up and down you can offset the next row if you want to create more of a zigzag effect or you can set them all so that you have the four squares all coming together there's there's a lot of different options for how you can set these together they're just so much fun such a great way to use up scraps and they make really durable quilts when they're finished I hope you enjoyed all this information today about string blocks if you're watching on youtube hit the subscribe button then if you enjoyed today's content hit the like button as always you can leave questions or comments on the channel or on the blog thanks so much for stopping by

Channel: A Quilting Life

Views: 147,388

Rating: 4.9578366 out of 5

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Id: CEHSGdGiL4c

Length: 7min 1sec (421 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2019