How to Sew a Quilt As You Go ( QAYG ) Scrappy String Quilt Block

hey guys it's robin arson crafts and welcome to my studio this week we are going to continue with our quilt as you go blocks these are the ones that i plan on putting together at the end of the series and they will become a sewing machine mat for my sewing machines in the craft room so today we're going to do a quilt as you go string block i decided to add a little bit of top stitching onto this one this version i have all of the visible quilt as you go lines these are both made the same way but this is the one we're going to work on today stringbox can be made in any size that you want so if you're going to be making a king size quilt you can go up to a 12 and a half inch block or even a 15 16 inch block whatever works for you i've also seen this done an entire quilt done in a string block blocks are a great block to do as a quilt as you go it's also good to use up your scraps you can put some of your smaller bits your center one and a couple of the ones afterwards do need to be a little bit longer depending on the size of your block but once we start to get to the end we can use up a lot of scraps you can use up leftovers of triangle pieces or charm squares that we can cut on the diagonal and use on the corners so go ahead and grab some of your scraps and let's get sewing string blocks can be made in a few different ways today we're going to go with a simple quilt as you go i'm making eight and a half inch quilt as you go blocks for a sewing machine mat that way i can add a little color to my crafting space underneath my sewing machine it absorbs a little bit of the sound which really isn't that much of a problem for me but also when i do a live stream i can grab that mat and easily slide my machine across the table for a better view so my blocks are going to be eight and a half inches as we're doing a quilt as you go i always like to make things around about an inch larger give or take it depends on what you're making and how much quilting you're going to be doing now my background fabric is just a piece of scrap fabric that i really don't care about too much it's not going to be seen it's not going to be the actual back of my sewing mat once i put all of my blocks together i will be adding a different back to it and i'm going to use two inch strips it depends on the size of your block you might want to have larger strips maybe two and a half inch strips if you're going to do like a 12 and a half inch block and if you're going to go smaller down to maybe a six and a half inch block you might want to go to a one and a half inch trip it all depends on what you're doing now i have made four and a half inch string blocks and i've gone down to about three quarters of an inch to an inch and it just fits in the space better if you do a six and a half inch block such as my quilting ruler here and you put two inch or two and a half inch strips it's not going to take very many before you fill it up so you're only going to put your center strip and maybe two on either side and that may work for you remember this is going to be your project and your block size so whatever size block you want to make whatever with strips you want to use just go ahead and use that string blocks are pretty forgiving you can do almost anything with them now since we're only making one string block i went ahead and chose my fabrics gave them a good press made sure they're all two inches wide and i cut them sort of to length and i decided to also lay them out just to get an idea of where my strips are going to go and how long they need to be when i'm laying them out i do overlap them about a quarter inch ish because that's what our seam allowance is going to be but i'm definitely not getting out the ruler and double checking i just make sure that they're longer than my block because when we put them on we're going to sew them right sides together and flip them over so we need to make sure that it's going to cover the entire piece of batting i'm using my cotton batting that i always like to use it's nice and thin just really enjoy this cotton batting when you go ahead and press on it it presses nice i don't have to worry about any type of polyester and if it's going to melt to my iron or anything like that but you can really use any type of batting you'd like when we get to the corners they can be a little tricky you could always use a little bit of a wider strip when you get to the end some people when they do string blocks they like to cut a square and then cut it on the diagonal and that way they can either have the same on each end or they can use it for two different blocks now this piece is obviously way too big but i'm just going to go ahead and use it i thought i would center a flower on there somewhere just to add a little bit to the end we'll see as i'm stitching if i'm really going to need these blocks or how big they need to be as i'm just guessing on the seam allowances here so as i'm sewing i'm just going to lay these out like this now if i were making a quilt i would just have a whole bunch of two inch or whatever with strips you're using inside a basket or a plastic bin or a paper bag if you want to just pull it out one by one and take a chance of whatever fabric comes out you can totally color coordinate these choose specific fabrics some people like to have a solid colored going down the center or a fabric that reads like a solid whether it be a white or a black or any color actually that way each square will always have let's say this even this dr seuss fabric you can use this on all of your squares and then when you put a quilt together you'll get a secondary effect on the way that they all meet up and make kind of a lattice looking thing i'm only making the one block so i'm not going to worry about that i'm just going to put my novelties down and just go from there i did try to make sure i didn't have like maybe two of the blue fabrics touching each other the cotton batting tends to cling to fabric really well so i just gave these two a good press together so that they'll hold themselves together nicely you can use a little spray adhesive if you want you could put a couple pins in it just remember where you're going to be sewing first our first strip is going to go on the diagonal so you don't want to put your pins right there on that diagonal strip if you're using the same fabric on all of them and you want to make sure everything lines up you can fold your fabric in half just to find that center point on the end and you can line it up with the point there and do the same thing when you get down to the bottom just figure out where the halfway is and line it all up and then that way your lattice will be all lined up nicely when you're going but you can also use various widths on your strips you don't have to use all two inch strips i could use some narrower ones or some wider ones it's all depending on what scraps you have and what look you're going for if you look up string block quilts and you check them on google or you look up them on pinterest you can see such a wide variety there are various patterns some people will make all blue on one side and then all yellow on the other side or they'll make the entire string block one color you can make stars and other designs with it there's just so many things you can do with a string block if you needed to make a dozen quilts you can do them all in string blocks and each quilt will look differently depending on how you sew your blocks but i'm only sewing one block so it's going to be super simple i just wanted to give you guys the different options of things you can do with them so let's actually get sewing the block if you want to do some visible quilting lines on top you can go ahead and do that now i was thinking that if you were doing it in certain colors let's say maybe you were doing the blue block you can always use white thread or another contrasting thread and do some type of a special t-stitch down the center of any of your strings or you can go ahead and just do quarter inch matchstick quilting all the way through it i would leave a little space on the ends here because we are going to be putting our neck strings on it and they're going to take up any of that space you don't want to quilt underneath where you're going to be sewing it's just a waste of time and thread now i'm just using white thread and i have white thread in my bobbin but when i make a bunch of string blocks just to use up scraps and if i'm doing it on batting most of the time i do mine on paper and then i remove the paper afterwards but i use all my leftover bobbins the bobbins that only have enough to maybe do one or two seams if that yes it's going to take time to constantly change out your bobbin but i have a drop in bobbin on my machine so it doesn't take that long for me to go ahead and change it out and if you guys have the ones that go on the side underneath or over here you probably are used to doing it so much anyway so it's probably quick for you so it's a great way to use up the bobbins that just have a few bits on it or maybe that really strange neon yellow thread that you had to buy for a specific halloween project or something that you're never going to use again it's not going to be seen in this project the way we're sewing it if you're using some type of a light colored fabric something might show through if you're using a black but for the most part if we're using the novelty strips things aren't going to show now normally i stitch my quilts at a 2.0 stitch length i'm going to go up to a 2.4 you can go up to a 2.6 if you like of course we want to make sure that our seams and everything is going to stay together nicely our strips aren't going to come undone but we are going through the fabric the batting and our backing piece so we can go ahead and lengthen it a little bit i wouldn't go too long because again we do want everything to stay nice and if we decide not to add any quilting to the rest of this block we need to make sure that what we're doing right now holds everything together so i'm going to go with a 2.4 and that's going to be fine when i go to put my next piece on i have my first piece is right side up i have it as centered as best i could i'm not too worried since it's only going to be one block in my project our next piece is going to go right sides down but we want to make sure that when we put it down so that if we flip it over it's going to cover our batting everywhere now my batting as i said is about an inch wider than it needs to be so instead of an eight and a half inch block i've got about a nine and a quarter nine and a half inch block here so i know that if i have it be a little bit short by accident that i'm going to be trimming it so it'll be okay i just find it easier to make sure it's going to cover all the way plus my strips are a little bit longer so that's good too i'm just going to line it up and using a quarter inch seam allowance i'm going to put my presser foot for my machine this is where the quarter inches put my presser foot right against here and i'm just going to stitch all the way down you can add a couple pins to it if you'd like just to hold it together especially if you're doing the solid strip down the center and you want them all to match i think it's a really good idea to put a few pins in now since our stitching went through our batting and our backing fabric now it's considered quilting so we've actually started to quilt our piece i am using that extra bit of scrap backing just because it slides through the machine nicely and i want that extra little bit of structure this is really good if you're making bags tote bags or zipper pouches you're going to have that extra layer of fabric that's going to give you that extra bit of structure you want and you should not really have to use any type of stabilizer or interfacing or anything like that so now at this point we're going to be moving our fabric over now you can finger press this a lot of times if i'm just doing one small block and i don't want to keep getting up and down from my machine i might go ahead and just use the wooden iron to finger press it or you can keep a small pressing mat and a small iron next to your machine i'm going to take this over to my big steam iron i'm going to give this a good press just to make sure it stays out of the way but to save myself some time and some trips of getting up and down i'm going to put my next piece on on this side so again when i choose to lay it down this one's really extra long so i don't worry about it but i'm going to make sure that when i put it down it's going to be in the right position if you want to keep using your little bits on the end for crumb blocks you can always slide it down just make sure you're going to be covering up your batting all the way and then down here at the end when i trim it up i will have that extra bit for a crumb a crumb block if i'm using leftover bobbins anytime i stop at the end i like to look at my bobbin again it's so much easier when it's a drop in bobbin because i can see how much thread is on there in this instance as we're stitching it down here you're not going to see it if you were putting your quilting stitches on top you'd want to be able to complete a full long line if on this part you're run out of bobbin thread like right here it's going to be okay to put another one in with another color nobody's going to notice but if we were doing it up here it would be very noticeable so i would take this over to my iron now i'm going to go press it both sides and that's going to save me from only having to get up once at this point since i've already got my strips all pre-cut i'm not going to worry about trimming off any of the extra i'll get all those pieces off when i trim up the entire block when i'm doing this on a paper backing i will do maybe 10 blocks at a time so i will go ahead and stitch both of these on and then i will do it for 10 blocks i haven't done a quilt as you go version like this for an entire quilt but i would do the same process even if i was doing quilt as you go i would definitely like to go with a nice assembly line that way i'm not constantly as a jack-in-the-box getting up all the time to go and press something and even if you have it right next to you on the side of your sewing machine you would be constantly stopping so i'd rather just do a whole bunch of them at a time i find 10 works really good for me 20 i feel like i'm sewing forever before i get to stop but 10 is a really nice number now if you want you can go ahead and just stitch down here maybe do a little top stitching about an eighth of an inch right over here just an eighth of an inch off of the seam and that'll give you that little bit extra quilting on top give you something to see in a little bit of texture without having to do several lines at the same time so i'm going to go ahead and stitch both of these down just to see what it looks like now i just go ahead to my next two pieces and since i have them lined up this was on the right side so now i know i have my little fishies to go next remembering to always put them right sides together and lining them up along the edge quarter inch seam and then the same on this side now this one says go bananas i can decide if i want it if i put it in this way like this when i press it over i'm not going to really see the go bananas too much so maybe if i put it this way i'm going to lose some of it in the next seam also but i do have a better chance to get some of it this way so i'm going to put it like this [Music] then i could take it to my iron and press of both of these this block is a little more forgiving when you get to a certain point after you add these two strips on once you want to hit it with your iron you can easily keep your iron off of the batting because if you're doing these two strips first your iron can easily stay on here unlike some of the other ones like the log cabin there was always a chance that our iron in the beginning could touch our batting if you have any issues like that you can go ahead and put a pressing cloth down and you won't have to worry about it it'll protect your iron from the batting this section is still a little bit large you could take a large maybe a charm square or larger and cut it on the diagonal and put it in there now i know my block is going to be smaller than this so that might work but i'm just going to go ahead with what i'd already chosen and just put this down making sure it's going to cover everywhere now a lot of times they use that square here because if we're going to be trimming this up you're going to lose a bit of it and also when you sew your blocks together you're going to lose in a seam allowance there so you might only end up with this little itty bit of a triangle which is why a lot of people like to put a square cut on the diagonal in this section there it's some type of a triangle since i'm only doing the one block i'm really not going to worry about it go get these pressed you could put your ruler on top of this now and just see where everything's gonna show up you could put your points here in the corner and just see where eight and a half is so you might only be getting just a little small smidgen on here so we could always put our next piece on like this just to make sure we're gonna have enough of the fabric showing i just checked mine with the ruler and yes i will only have a little bit showing if i just put it on right here since i'm not looking for anything particular so i'm just going to lay this down and give myself this extra bit over here and just trim this off after i stitch it so my last piece will be narrower than two inches but it's just one block and it's going to be a scrappy sewing machine mat so i'm not going to worry about it but i just need to make sure it's going to cover everywhere if i put it this way i might get a little more of the flower in then i can just hold up the seam allowance and don't cut through my batting and just trim that little extra bit off that way i don't have that extra bulk underneath there i could do the same thing here i'm going to trim this down just a little bit to see if i can get some of that cupcake in when i stitch it just put that like that trim my flying piggies away you can see i did not do my top stitching on here you can do your entire block and then go back and top stitch it there's nothing that that was my cat miss morsi's there's nothing that's going to be in the way that i have to do the top stitching first i can always do it all at the end just want to make sure when i'm top stitching that i'm going from batting to batting i don't need to go through the whole fabric there that way i can cut these pieces off and save them for crumbs here's our block all stitched up we have these fun little two lines of quilting on it which no one's going to see on the back i know they're there i can just see them now and say i like that look i could always put another little line of stitching about an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch from this stitch or an eighth of an inch from the seam and then i would have those double lines of stitching going down there that might be fun also now the trim it up since i'm only doing one block i can just put my ruler down make sure that i'm within my batting i could go from the back also because i can see my two points here i can see my fabric i can just line it up and try to put the corners and match them up you have that line that goes down the center of most of your rulers if you were doing this and you were having that specific center block to be a certain color the black white red whatever you want to really take care to make sure that you're lining it up straight down the center of this line because we want it to match up all of our other blocks you can always take one of the little hair markers find the center points so this is an inch and a half so i go down to three quarters of an inch i can draw a line with my hair a marker you can also do with some type of a marking tool but this way i know after i press it that that crease is just going to go away and then when i line this up i can put my line down the center of my ruler like when we're doing our half square triangles and i'll know that that's definitely right in the center so that when my next block and i have like a four of them sewn together that these are all going to turn into an x or a diamond or whatever design you're doing i don't really have to worry about that but since i already have that mark let's just go ahead and use it i want to make sure that i have fabric all the way around so i'm doing eight and a half inches i wanna make sure that i can see fabric all the way around i'm gonna get some of this i will get a little bit of the cupcake in so i can line this up as i said make sure if you want you can go ahead and put some type of tape on here something that is low stick i just picked this up at the dollar tree there's actual tape that you can put on your ruler that's made for quilting and just line it up if you have a rotating mat that's going to fit the size of the block you're cutting that's always helpful and i'll just line it up at this side now i'm lining up the edges with the eight and a half inches because that's size of my block whatever size block you're doing your number is going to be different you can always turn it i usually do two sides but you guys are looking over my shoulders so it's a little bit harder it's easier for me to just turn it [Music] and it takes that really crazy wild looking string block and it turns it into something that's much nicer and calmer looking again any of these pieces you can save them put them in your scrap pile put them in your crumb bin or just toss them whatever works for you in your craft room and there's my eight and a half quilt as you go string block and this is a really great way to use up the novelty fabrics if you have something that you might not quite enjoy maybe it's just not the fabric you like i do have narrower bits down here and here and as i'm looking at it i think i really prefer a narrower string on there so next time i might go ahead with a one and a half or even one and three quarters just that quarter inch can really make a big difference when you're putting these strings together so we did a little bit of top stitching on that one and just to show you another option i did the visible quilting like we did on the one log cabin so i have tons of matchstick quilting on here as you can see there are a lot of lines this is great for a tote bag it has a nice feel to it without it being stiff this one is still very very soft and pliable where this one is just got a little bit more structure to it i don't think i would do this version on a giant quilt that is a lot of quilting on it and is a lot of thread but if that's the look you're going for then go ahead and go for it i do find that this is great again for tote bags or bags it's good for hot pads table runners placemats i like to have that little bit extra i don't always want to have a quilt on my table but i find that this just changes it up enough that it does no longer look like a quilt these two blocks while made exactly the same with the fabrics i went with just the green out of my scrap bin for this one and i just think that having all these quilting lines on it it just adds that a little bit extra where this one like i said it looks like someone cut up a quilt and put it on my table this one makes it look like it needs to be on the table it's more i don't want to say artistic more creative more something it just reminds me of maybe bamboo placemats or something like that with all that quilting so far we've been making a variety of quilts as you go we have our log cabins we've got our hexagon log cabin i have extra quilting on this one this one's regular we've got our string blocks i have a good variety to choose from i think i'm going to make two separate sewing mats i'm going to do one that has the visible quilting with the single color blocks and then i'm going to do a crazy novelty one so our next quilt is you go block is going to be the hexagons you make those little hexagon flowers you do the english paper piecing and stitch them all together and do it that way we're going to go ahead and do that next week where we're going to make our flower and then we're going to go ahead and just quilt it down to our block our code word for this week will be cupcake so thanks for hanging out with me and i'll see you guys in the next video bye

Channel: RsIslandCrafts - Robin

Views: 2,297

Rating: 4.9757576 out of 5

Keywords: quilt as you go, how to quilt as you go, strip quilt, scrappy quilt, scrap buster, quilt as you go tutorial, how to quilt as you go for beginners, quilt as you go scrappy quilt, quilt as you go strips, qayg string block, string quilt block

Id: BccuA8_Yvms

Length: 25min 42sec (1542 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021