Learn to Make an EASY String Quilt! | Prairie Point Quilt & Fabric Shop

[Music] okay hi I'm Susan with Prairie Pointe quilting fabric shop in Lenexa Kansas and I want to do a video here a little tutorial for you on how to make a string quilt so it's really easy to do I'm gonna have a free pattern on our website for you but you could probably make it just off of what I show you here today so the the idea of this is a foundation piece and we're going to piece the strips of fabric these are strings you just cut your fabric up in just little strings sew them onto a muslin base and it's a great quilt for using up your scraps if you have a stash that you want to cut up or just scraps that you don't know what else to do with or how else to use them not much good for a lot of things but too good to throw away this is the way to use them as in a string quilt that aside alright I'm going to show you some of the things that we'll be doing here so these are the little blocks and starting out with little six-inch ones here so you can do all kinds of fun things and then look just take fabrics from lots of different fabric collections that you have and put them together into one block and they just come together real nice this is a very old technique and it was made I don't know how many years ago people started to make these probably even in the 19th century but I want to show you this one here that somebody made on newspaper we're gonna do it on Muslim but this was made on newspaper and then the idea would be to pull the paper away but it's a completed one this is from 1949 it has a date on it so that's an old block and I'll show you some pictures that came of some magazines probably 15 20 years ago or so but these are antique quilts in the magazines you can see how people use some I'm sure then it was just a great way to use up scraps from making clothing or clothing that wasn't worn anymore here's one where it shows this antique quote has sashing in between the blocks and there's another one that shows much larger blocks put together and here's kind of a kaleidoscope effect type of lock and see how wonky that is and it looks like a really modern quilt but it's actually an antique one so now this thing I'll show you here is after you make your blocks and so on so I'm up trim them up then you will put them together into a larger block so I like to call these a little block unit and then this is the block that you will have so in the instructions that I've written I refer to this is the block with all four of them sewed together and you can do it in any color way you want just pick out you know whatever you think things that you love and that that's the fun thing about it and it's a great way to put a lot of fabrics from your previous quilts all into one quilt and then you have kind of a little memory of things that you've made in the past and here's one that's made with a much larger block and that's the one of the demo that I'm going to do for you today is the larger block okay so we'll start out with muslin foundation for these blocks and it'll take several yards of muslin I recommend washing the muslin first so that it is cut a shrink shrunk up and pressed out and then just have a whole stack of muslin squares that you're going to use and if you know how big you're going to make it then just cut that many squares and if not then you know you can just go back and cut more later get some more muscling and then we're going to cut some strips so if you're cutting from your scrap so you have at home you might have scraps of all different shapes and sizes and everything so this is a good way to use them but they might end up making kind of a mess if you have little squares left over from a quilt if you have leftover half square triangles they're great in this and I'll show you how pretty soon and my little pile might start out really neat at first but as I get going and using them and pulling out of it it usually becomes just one big jumbled up pile so this is some scraps I've had for a while but this is what I'm working on today so as you can see I have my pile of scraps on top but I left a nice neat little collection here for you so I'll usually just cut up all my strips and this is cut from yardage so it's not cut from my stash or scraps that I have at home so that's why it looks even neater then it you know it might be if you did it from your scraps but I'll lay them out in here and then as I begin pulling them out and using them and I'll have smaller ones leftover it gets to be quite a little jumbled up mess so I'm gonna put that back in there here's some used strips that I have that I will use again pretty soon so for my blocks I'm gonna start out with a square just like this and I'm gonna take one of my strips out of my little box I'm gonna lay it right there down the middle okay and I usually have the center I don't have to have the center but I usually make sure that the corner is well covered I don't want to start out with it with these the edge right at the corner of the corner or even where the seam lines gonna be because that will create extra bulk in those areas when you sew one block to another and so then I'm gonna put this one right on top of there and I'm gonna sew right across there now you can trim that off now before you sew or you can wait until after you sew so that goes on there and then here's an example of the stitching line on there okay so then I'm gonna press that back like that and I'm going to do that on the iron over here and I want to make sure that I press it all the way over all right don't want any little bumps in there so I'm gonna take that and then I'm gonna take another piece to take a long one out of there and I'm gonna lay it on the other side and sew it alright so that's the next step and then it will look like looks like this one here so we've got two strips sewed on now what I do is also one strip on one side then on the other side and then I'll go over to the iron and that's a is a step two all the way over to the ironing board wherever your honor might be so I'm gonna press that out actually it doesn't hurt just set your seam first press that one out nice and smooth and then I'm gonna take another strip and okay that one's not quite long enough so I'm gonna have to find a longer one because I'm afraid that we'll get caught in there so say we put two of them on there I got two more on I'm going on press that down press that over I said over like that okay and I'm gonna go all the way to the edge and just keep going and this is where your leftover half square triangles in your scraps might be helpful or if you have a square that you can cut in into corners triangle corners they would be useful there as opposed to using other strips that's going to waste more fabric but you know either way either way you want to do that okay and then I have another one here okay these are my finished ones so what I'm gonna do here is show you what it looks like when you're all done when you have all of your pieces on there and goes all the way out to the corners the muslin is completely covered up so we're going to take square ruler is probably the most helpful and easiest to use for that so I'm gonna cut these into nine and a half inch squares I don't remember if I told you that my muslin squares are ten inches whereas the little ones I showed you at the beginning or cut seven inches okay so I'm gonna look at this and I'm not gonna cut it on this side because I want to be sure and get all my muslin in so I'm gonna turn that over and you probably can't see it because the thread blends in but there's all these stitching lines on here where these are sewed on and just well I'm thinking of it the thread that you use for this it's a great way to use up any leftover thread you have if you have colors of thread that you don't really have any other use for I'm use those if you have bobbins that are half full and you wish that color wasn't on that bobbin this is a great time to use up all those different odds and ends of threads and bobbins that you have okay I'm going to put the ruler right here on the muslin square and this is a ten and a half inch ruler but I'm going to have two of my sides right here the nine and a half inch lines are right within the muslin square so I'm going to take my ruler I'm gonna turn this around I'll lay this on the nine and a half inch line here at the other two sides if you have a nine and a half inch square ruler that's ideal too okay turn it over and it's fun to see how these just magically turn out to be beautiful blocks so looking like this they look kind of not really ugly because the fabrics over here a full but just don't look the same until you cut them up so I'm going to show you that again here a little bit what is she doing it's all the same process you can do this with your regular six and a half by 24 inch ruler it just is easier to do with the square ruler [Music] like that all these beautiful blocks okay and then when you're done with that you will end up with a whole bunch of little scraps like this and don't just toss these aside you can use these again in little places like in the corners but if you have to put something on there that will come back and just do your corner nicely when you have to get to those areas okay so let's go on to the squares that I have here and so when you get these all put together you will lay them out on the table turn on the floor a big table if you have one and actually you will put together your blocks first so I'm going so four of these together I'll lay them out and you don't have to do a lot of looking at them and deciding which ones you go together they're probably gonna look great and one thing about it is it's it's nice to have these seams that don't come together these don't line up like some patterns I'll have you make these types of blocks where everything's lined up it's not really a string quilt they'll just cut into strips and made real symmetrical this is supposed to be a little wonky and I think that adds to a lot of the charm of it so some of the things like this one here both these corners don't look alike this one's a little too close to the corner that's fine it won't won't be symmetrical perfectly and that's okay another thing that you can look for in these is when you do something like this and here in here so one thing I might do avoid doing is putting these two next to each other because that's really gonna stand out in the quilt there's a big V in there just flip this around this one over here if you have scenes coming too close together in the center turn it around or move these around get you another block or something like that so you don't have a lot of scenes collected right there in the center of the block right after you do that you will so two of these together to here and then across there but but you're gonna press your seams open as you go because of the foundation base here you're not gonna have problems with seams being knocked strong in there so go ahead and press them open that really reduces bulk because you have all those edges there spreads that bulk out and that will make a nice for you okay so now I want to show you a couple other things as you get to making these I usually make these ten or twelve at a time so what I'll do is start doing something like this I'll start chain piecing them so also I'll lay a strip on the middle of one so my first strip on go to the next one and do it again and again and again until I have a chain of about ten or twelve of these okay then I'll cut it off cut them apart and then I'll go back and I'll sew another piece on the other side and do that to all ten of them then I will take them all to my ironing board and press them all out like that very securely and then just start going to each side again and repeating that process then when they're all done and cut up I will start another ten of them and do that again it kind of breaks it up but I don't feel like this is very boring to make it's just so fun to see how every block comes together the more fabrics you have the more fun it can be and the more variety you're going to have in placing your blocks out there if you only had 10 or 12 fabrics it would be probably a very different look than if you have I have 24 fabrics here but I'm going to show you some quilts that have even more than that so what I've done here is made up these with a collection of fabrics so these are all tilda fabrics they're not all from the same line of tilda but they are all tilda and they they go together very well and it is fun to mix them up that way so what I've done is cut some fat quarters of those and this is what's available and you'll have all these pretty different fabrics to choose from to cut up your strips so again just cut up your strips the strip's will be cut anywhere from one and a quarter to two and a half inches I would have fewer one and a quarter and fewer two and a half and have most of them kind of in between but you can adjust those as you go along if you feel like you got too many wide ones in there move your strip over a little bit so that you have a wider seam in there and then you can make it narrower you can even place it on there a little wonky so that you have wonky shaped strips in there I don't know if there's any of these are like that okay so we do have bundles for that if you're interested in something like that and I want to show you some of the quilts I have here this one it's one of the first ones I've made this is with the six inch blocks so this has a lot of fabrics in it that just coordinate but they don't really all coordinate all ways put these together in a quilt but for a string quilt you can do that you can get away with it and it uses up your your scraps and people will do these cut up all their strips so make a quilt and they don't even notice a dent in there their scraps because you have so many of them but it does use quite a bit you'll use six to eight yards of break2 put these together in your scraps the bundles here are going to have six and a half yards in them and they'll make you know it's probably close to a twin size quilt so what I've done on this one was hold it together with straight line stitching and just went back and forth all the way across about a half inch from the seam and then I wanted more in there to hold it together so I tied it in the center's with pearl cotton so each block has a tie in it to hold it together and then you just find that fun backing and put your binding on and you do not have to quote that yourself that way this one was quilted on the long arm and this is made with the larger blocks so this has a lot of Kate facet Annie Butler prints motifs and Michael Miller and fun things like that that come together and you know again it could just be kind of a great memory of what you have used and made in the past with your different script scraps and you can even maybe you exchanged with friends too so I hope you have enjoyed this video and have fun making this quilt it's it's the one thing I like about it it's kind of a no-brainer type thing you don't have to do a lot of thinking and planning and math and worrying about if you're doing the wrong thing or not much ripping out on this just what make sure your attention is right when you do it and press your seams to the sides before you go on to the next one I find that finger pressing isn't good enough you'll have little lumps and bumps in there and that's not desirable so thanks for watching and we'll be doing some more videos for you later [Music] [Music]

Channel: Prairie Point Quilt and Fabric Shop

Views: 149,528

Rating: 4.9056206 out of 5

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Id: 27vuBxgkzqg

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020