How to Sew a Scrappy Stained Glass Block

hello friends and welcome i am samantha of krebs bock cuber crafts and if you're new here i show you how i make things subscribe for more tutorials today i am showing you the long awaited tutorial on how i make my stained glass blocks these blocks are a great way to use up scraps of all shapes and sizes so let's get into it so to start with you will need your iron turned on and nearby we're going to be switching between ironing trimming and sewing so you won't want to be running around your workspace and stubbing your toes next you're going to need scraps of all sizes i tend to use scraps that are rectangular-ish in shape so my sashing is always orthogonal meaning perpendicular very mondrion of me to keep that rectangularness i'll be trimming and squaring to the sashing which i'll show you later so we want scraps of all kind it doesn't matter if your scraps have funky angles or anything like that because we're going to trim that out later you can see i have a variety of scraps here everything from with the fabric strips wider strips shorter strips strips of all shapes and sizes some smaller pieces in here they're all at least one inch in each dimension and then you're going to need some sashing i'm going for the stained glass vibe so i'm using black i pre-cut a bunch of solid black to three-quarter inch by width of fabric strips yes that is pretty narrow i've also made these blocks with one inch wide sashing use whatever width you're comfortable with i usually keep this pile of strips in a little tin next to my sewing machine so i can grab them as i need and then i work from my scraps right here in front of me so the basic premise of creating these blocks is taking two scraps and sashing them together let's start with these two scraps i'm going to put them together like this so i'm going to grab these scraps and sew my sashing onto the side yes the sashing strip is longer than my piece so i'm just going to clip off the excess sashing with a real scissors and then i'm going to press it when i press these pieces i always press to the sashing yes this is going to build up eventually you'll see that in a little bit but i don't mind that so then we're going to grab the other scrap and sew it onto the other side of the sashing we are going to press the seam to the sashing working with narrow sashing like this will lead to seam build up the advantage of this are my featured fabrics will lay nice and flat and i get a nice build up behind the sashing that raises it and really makes it look like solder lines now we're going to add our next piece pick a side any side i want to clean up these weird angles so i'm going to go with this side before i can add it i need to square it i mentioned before that i square to the sashing to do that i use a ruler that has these little quarter inch marking lines and when i place my ruler i'm going to line up those lines so they run along the seam between my sashing and my scrap it looks like the camera just barely picked it up here but you can see that my two and three quarter inch quarter inch line is on the seam between the light teal piece and my sashing then i'm going to line up the top edge of my ruler with the shallowest point on my seam so i have this angle that cuts in a little bit and i don't want any gaps in my seam allowance so i'm going to go ahead and shift my ruler so that it lines it up and then i'm going to go ahead and lop off this excess so now i'm going to pick another scrap to go along this edge and which one do i want does this one fit yes it's almost like i planned it so now i'm going to sash these two pieces together just like we did with the other piece we're going to go ahead and sew sashing onto one side we're going to press the sashing and then we're going to sew the other piece to the other side of the sashing and then we're going to go ahead and press to the sashing again and we'll have a little unit so that is the basic premise of creating these blocks we can keep adding to this unit to make it larger by just picking another side and sashing another scrap to that side remember if you want the super rectangular pieces like i was making square the edges using the sashing as your guide and the lines on your ruler so you can see it a little bit clearer here in this clip where my two and a quarter inch quarter inch line is along the seam between my really light teal piece and my sashing and then my two and a half inch line is on the other side of that piece of sashing so i'm squaring to the sashing line sliding my ruler to the lowest edge then i'm going to go ahead and trim it and make sure i get a clean edge and now this edge is ready for sashing another piece on i can choose from any of my scraps and i can just go ahead and edit this edge and right about here is where my camera decided to cut off and i had no idea so we're just going to get a fast forwarded overhead view so what i'm doing here is i'm just adding to this piece that we started and then i'm also starting to build a strip unit a strip unit is built by adding sashing to one side of a bunch of strips and then joining your sashed strips together with the non sashing side to the sashing side as you're you're seeing me do here [Music] oh my god son of a [Music] alrighty so my camera got cut off on me and i had no idea so we're back now with much fewer strat scraps and a slightly different camera angle so once you have the basic premise down and you've gone ahead and worked your pieces so remember we started with these few pieces um i sewed this piece on and remember this piece was pretty big it was about that wide i sewed this piece on and then just chopped it off so this is a usable piece i can save for later and this piece i then after i chopped it off i added this piece here you can keep working these pieces so that you make effectively what kind of looks like a courthouse block until you have a block of the size that you want i actually work in units so i go ahead and i make some units until they're an arbitrary size um so these are a few of the units that i've made while my camera was not recording and i also made this strip unit and if i cut these a certain width i get a nice little chain of squares so that's why i go ahead and make these strip units so i'm making an eight and a half inch block and now i have a whole bunch of units so i'm going to go ahead and assemble these units so that they're roughly going to fill up my eight and a half inches so if i take this and i put it down here on the bottom and then i take this component so this component has a few small pieces i like to put those towards the inside so i'm gonna probably put that right around there then i'm going to take this unit i don't want to put this small piece on the outside because i could end up having to trim that off and i don't want that to get much smaller so i'm going to go ahead and put that there um i've got about this is going to be about one and a half inches that i need to fill up because it's going to overlap by a quarter inch because i'm using quarter inch hashtag i'm probably going to actually fill this in with my strip unit and i'm probably going to add it right about there now so this is going to get cut off like this i have a whole bunch of these other little units that i'm going to use to fill in this top row so i'm going to go ahead and put that one there i'll probably take put this one nice and tall right there and i'll go ahead and i might actually put that unit like that and so i'll get this nice little corner so we're going to go ahead and kind of sort of start assembling this i'm going to start by sashing these two pieces together so just as before we're going to go ahead and square our edges when we're going to go sash these pieces together we're looking for the same thing you're going to square to the sashing if you want that nice rectangular edge and then i like chain piecing so i'm just going to go ahead and chain piece these all together i do this by sewing a whole bunch of strips to my long strip of sashing clipping it off and then pressing and everything as you're you're seeing me do here and then we just keep building these units up into rows and we're popping in and interrupting this montage with i'm an idiot i screwed up so i totally meant to sash this onto this on that side i even sewed the sashing on that then i squared this and i sewed that onto that side so i'll be seam ripping this all right so now that we've addressed that i'm an idiot i'm gonna go ahead and i'm gonna sew that on right there alrighty now here we are with all of my beautiful pieces um gone ahead and sashed these together while i was sashing them together i just went and trimmed this up so that i didn't have this giant piece um and sewed those on into one row sew these into another row and then here's my last row so what i'm going to go ahead and do is i'm going to trim all of these edges where i'm going to join them together even and then i'm going to figure out if i actually have enough here to fill out my eight and a half inch block i'm starting by looking at squaring this edge here i am noticing that this is longer than eight and a half inches which means i would lose this full unit down here if i were to go ahead and cut this edge square so i'm actually going to rough cut this down to about eight and a half inches before straightening the edges i don't always do that but this situation warrants it because i don't have final positioning of this strip in the finished block i'm going to leave myself a little wiggle room on this rough cut and remember we're squaring to the sashing and that's good enough so i'm going to go ahead and lock this off this is now left over for next time so now i can turn this sideways and i can go ahead and i can straighten this edge and line this all up i'm going to line up all my lines once again make sure that i'm nice and straight i'm also doing a few double checks with some of these and making sure they're running parallel to sashing going that way and that's good enough make a slow cut when you do that the longer cuts you're not just going to want to because the sashing because the sashing is so high this actually is not pressed against this fabric and i can move this around like you wouldn't believe so make a slow cut make sure when you walk between the pieces that you push down your rulers do have a little bit of a bend to them so they will press against that fabric and hold it in place when i sash these pieces together they overlap by a quarter inch and so to make sure i at least cover my eight and a half inch square i'm going to go ahead and line these up and over wrap overlap them by roughly a quarter inch using the lines on my mat so we got about a quarter inch overlap there and about a quarter inch overlap there now i'm just going to take my ruler and i'm going to set it as though i were placing it to square i'm going to line up this bottom corner so i'm filling from this corner up so it looks like i've got my horizontal covered perfectly but my vertical is missing a little bit up here and when i do get up here i can also see okay it comes to about a half inch down that i'm missing some coverage and i'm going to have a quarter inch of overlap so i need about a piece that is at least three quarters of an inch to fill in this here that's awfully skinny if i stop and think about it because if it's three quarters of an inch with a quarter inch seam allowance on this side and a quarter inch seam allowance on this side i'm going to only have a little teeny tiny strip that is a quarter inch wide across the top here i don't like the idea that i'm only going to have a little teeny tiny quarter inch up there so i have a few options i can actually take this piece out entirely throw it away say i'm going to use that on my next block and use this as my bottom edge now i actually need one and a half inches in order to fill this in i can assemble some interesting pieces in that one and a half inches and i'm not going to have a little teeny tiny sliver because that's not visually interesting and it's also really picky and finicky to sew so that's it probably the option i'm going to go with another option would have been if i really wanted to leave this piece in the bottom here what i could have done was slid a larger gap somewhere in one of these so that i would have had like a half inch strip let's say this running down this middle bit here and it would have been a half an inch wide and i would have taken some of that extra off of here that's another option play with things because i still need to make up that missing half inch and i don't want to do it with a half inch piece i'm actually going to throw that away and save it for later and then i'm actually going to build something and probably to go down here because i like how this looks up here so let's remind ourselves how big that needed to be by overlapping these by about a quarter inch ish placing it down here in the corner and this runs across that one and a half inch line add a quarter inch so i need something that's about one and three quarter inches to two inches wide i'm gonna go with two inches because that way i have room for error so building this this additional pieces where some of these extra units that i have are going to come in handy so here i have an extra unit in order to fill this out to eight and a half inches wide i need something that is about two and a half inches wide well i've got another little piece up here that doesn't quite fit the bill yeah it just barely fits the bill but do i want like something looking like dental teeth up across the top probably not so i'm gonna put a little bit more visual interest in and i'm actually gonna flip it sideways and stick it in here because then that certainly fits the bill that direction and it certainly fits the bill that direction so i'm going to go ahead and sash that in [Music] alrighty so now i've got that sashed on there and that's roughly a straight edge let's just double check it so go ahead and line up my beautiful little quarter inch line on that sashing that i just added make sure that it's lined up on all the other ones and it's close enough to a straight edge then i'm not going to trim it because i'm lazy sometimes don't tell anybody so now i've got piece here i've got a piece here and here's the million dollar question do i put it like that yeah i actually kind of like that none of my fabrics are really conflicting some of my lines are conflicting a little bit because we've got that there but if i shift this way a smidge none of my lines can flick this one sits perfectly inside of that one and it looks intentional this looks intentionally off and i also don't have any of my fabrics that are next to each other so now i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to sash these together i'm going to sash these two and i'm going to sash these two press everything towards the sashing and we'll come back to trim it [Music] so now that we're all sashed together it's time to lift for the fun part the trimming so once again we're still looking for the same things that we were looking for before when we trim things so if i just take and i line this corner up with the deepest cut that i can make down here on this piece over here so i've got that's about eight and a half to this side over here let's come up here and look at the top i have three eighths of an inch left of that fabric there that's it that's all i've got and when i think about sewing these together that means i'm going to end up with a tiny little sliver 1 8 of an inch wide up here at the top i don't like that so we're not doing that so we're going to go ahead and slide this up a little bit further we're going to keep an eye on this corner down here there's nothing really we have to worry about over here so if we need to shift side to side and also on this side there's nothing we really have to worry about over here because the farthest we can shift we're still going to have a good amount of fabric left over here so these sides are fine i'm looking at the top and the bottom i can consolidate that by sliding it up a little bit it's going to leave me a little more space i'm probably going to lose this part of this unit down here but i'm going to be able to keep all of these pieces because this is about an inch and then if i look over here i'm going to lose this bit no matter what there's nothing i can do i can't really slide this this much further that's about the best i can do going that way i'm losing this no matter what i do but i'm not losing this and i'm not losing this and in fact when i cut this piece i'm actually going to cut it this way so that i end up with this as a unit left over now that i've decided roughly where i'm going to cut i'm going to position this because right now we can see you can see this piece of sashing behind and you can see my line going from one side of the sashing diagonal to the other side of the sashing so clearly i am not parallel with my sashing so we're going to do some little squeaky squeak rotation by the time you get this far in nothing is going to be perfectly perpendicular i will say that if you looked at any of my blocks and you thought they were perfectly perpendicular then it means i'm great at taking pictures not that i'm great at sewing so we're looking at this these are roughly lined up looks like this got a little curvy but it looks like it's just that piece of sashing so i'm going to ignore that one this looks mostly lined up it looks like it's off by maybe a 32nd of an inch this is pretty guilty but it looks like because i see a little bit of folding in this fabric underneath you probably can't see it on the camera but i see the folding so it actually looks like that's not straight and you can see there are folds straightening out as i pull it a little bit underneath so now that looks straighter and this fabric isn't all warbled and wobbled underneath the ruler so right now i know i want to cut this flush i'm just going to grab an extra ruler for the moment so that i can get a nice straight line i'm going to line that up do a slow quick cut across so i'm going to just slowly cut across and as i reach the sashing i'm going to just ease over the top of the sashing then i'm going to move my fingers so that i am holding the ruler where i'm cutting it's a slow and steady cut we're not racing here so i'm going to save that for later i'm going to come over here i want to keep this part here so i'm going to go ahead and notch that and then cut very slowly across the bottom don't at me i'm going slowly i'm making sure i'm not cutting myself i don't want to hear you judging if it works it works all right so that's actual unit i'm gonna save that for later now i can freely slice this side make sure i'm still lined up on the top and bottom and i didn't slip once again cutting slowly pressing very firmly all right cool now i got three sides i can go ahead and rotate it so i don't have to go funny y'all thought i was gonna cut funny didn't you i could hear you screaming at me and just go ahead and slice this and this is also the easy cut because i happen to make this closest to the edge and there she is and that is the gist of how i make my scrappy improvised stained glass blocks but wait there's more so i totally understand that some of you are a little intimidated by the improvised quilting of this tutorial so i see you friends i see you and i understand and so to help you guys out i also created a stained glass block paper piecing pattern with the pattern you get two different blocks so you get this four square block which is made of four component blocks and then there is another pattern which is also a four square block but the squares are two thirds and one third for each row so if you want to go over and check out my instagram there's more information over there about how they go together and if you want to check out my shop you can totally buy the pattern yourself go check it out thank you guys for sticking around through the tutorial if you do make a few blocks tag me on social media i love seeing what you guys make if you want to see more tutorials like this check out my channel i don't know when i'll get around to posting another but you can stay in the know by subscribing you can also follow me on instagram where i'm currently in the middle of a 100 day project making one of these blocks a day so that's it for now catch you later

Channel: Krebsbachhuber Crafts

Views: 58,972

Rating: 4.8223739 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, fabric scraps, scrappy blocks, scrap blocks

Id: gfVlxzG4gfg

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020