Postage Stamp Block TUTORIAL, turn those scraps into curtains!!!

hello youtube friends today i want to talk to you about making the postage stamp quilt block which is what i made these curtains out of many years ago now i've asked i've been asked about these curtains a lot lots of different questions about them and and i've answered them a little bit and i even did make a video a long time ago about making the postage stamp block when i was making some little liberty lavender bags but i have a new project in mind now because these curtains that go all the way along my work room here i need some more i'll show you through where i'm going to put them but i'm going to extend the curtains out into the area behind that partition there and have curtains going along that window and that window because i'm completely reconfiguring how that part of the house looks and i looked and i thought well i need to make curtains for there it seemed like the only natural solution to the curtain problem was to continue with these when i made these years ago now i thought well that's the last time i'm ever going to make that block but because it does take well to make this amount takes a long time but it isn't a hard block to make and so i'm going to bring you along on the journey now of making the base unit i like to call it for the postage stamp block now in the bit of video that's going to come so i filmed every single process getting from this which is just a piece of fabric to this which is the base block now that block then disappears into the curtain when you sew lots of them together and i'm going to show you now how i did each of those individual steps where i cut the two inch strips sew them together sub cut them press them until i've got this block here so enjoy this [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] so there you go you can see then how i made this little block here and how i now have hundreds of these in order to make more of these blocks enough to make my curtains so there's a few questions i want to answer first of all and one is um why don't you make the strips longer and the blocks bigger so that you don't have so much tiddly bits of cutting to do kate you know i end up with one strip that's got four little two inch blocks on it and then i stitch all those together and i finish up with this block here which is let me quickly measure it it's six inches square and you think well you could actually just keep sewing and sewing and make it 12 inches square and the reason why i don't do that is because i want this block to have as much variety as possible so there's no likelihood of there being two fabrics next to each other when i pick two out of the basket and stitch them together so i want as much variety and as much mixed up color as possible in there now i'm making these because i need them for this area here but also if you watch that video about me making the bunting for the collaboration i did with the tate on the queen's jubilee i got all my boxes of fabric out my scraps not my big pieces my scraps of fabric and put them out on the table here and it seemed to me like there was never going to be a better time to make these curtains when i had all those fabrics out and basically i just picked all the fabrics from each of these boxes there's loads of them and just cut and cut and sewed and cut and pressed and sewed until i've got now i'm at this stage now i haven't made i've only made one of these to show you but i'm now in the process of making all of them into blocks like this so after i've pressed the fabric the first strip i cut is two inches wide by seven inches long now at this point you can scale your block up if you want to and you can use a two and a half inch strip a jelly roll strip if you wanted to do that but just bear in mind that however wide you make your strip your length of it has to be four times that plus a little bit for trimming off for error so if you're making this with a two and a half inch jelly roll strip which will fit the square will finish it two inches then you need to make your strip ten inches plus a bit yeah okay so the maths of this one's quite easy if you're making a square like this which is four by four then you just need to multiply the width by the by four to get the length that you need now these squares finish an inch and a half which is why they look so great i think the mosaic look of them they just look i think they look um i think they look okay so um my my strips are two inches two inches by seven inches which gives me a little tiny strip here now a long time ago uh maybe two or three years ago i did a project where i used up little strips like this and i've got a feeling that i might do that again as a little bonus project so i'm not throwing these away i'm going to keep them in this basket here this little basket's right here to put those strips in so the you end up then with a six by six inch block lots of them and the next thing i'm going to do when i've got all of these made is put them up on my design board so that i can then just take a black and white photograph take a photograph and put it into grayscale and just check that the um the distribution's about right so the questions i've been asked about this um project behind me here these curtains here which i absolutely love by the way i really love them otherwise i wouldn't be bothering to make more would i first question is are they lined and yes they are so they're lined with well what was quite a bright green fabric when i made them a few years ago and because this window is south facing it gets direct sun and so that means that the um the green backing fabric has bleached quite a bit that's fine but it has delayed the bleaching of these squares although they have faded quite a bit this is very much in direct sun all summer long so i don't mind that i think that the fading of the fabrics is actually really rather lovely which means that these new vibrant fabrics when they go up in this extension that i'm making here to the curtains they will they will look quite different until they too um get bleached by the sun so yes i will line these i'll line them with just whatever i've got plain fabric that i've got a lot of and i'll just line line those how they're hung is i just stitched quite big rink curtain rings on and i i bought a length of doweling that i painted green and um and i just threaded the the uh the the hooks through the doweling it's very simple and then at each end or or and at intervals there's a little bracket thing that i got from ikea i did it and so it's not woodwork it's not terribly hard at all if i did it just a little little drill bit of paint all that stuff that i love to do so what i've got to do now is get some more of that same doweling and take it out to the pavilion and paint it sometime i'm a long way off finishing this project but that's fine because i don't mind how long things take which brings me on to another question that i get asked a lot um if i've started a project and i've shown it you here on the youtubes i'll get a question oh how are you getting on with your denim jacket kate or or what's happening with anna's quilt project now the denim jacket is in progress uh there's been a couple of videos about that already and there'll be another one i haven't finished it it's uh it's a sort of thing that i just pick up of an evening and do a bit of stitching it's not important that i get this finished for a deadline anna's quilt now that we've got all these fabrics out i'm going to be inviting her to choose her favorites from this lot soon so that we can get on and make the next stage of anna's quilt it doesn't matter how long this takes she's really busy i'm really busy we fit these things in when we can and so same with agnes quilt now agnes's quilt is all pinned out it's actually on the board behind me uh because i'm sitting with my back to the curtain so i could talk about the curtains but over there on the design board is agnes quilt all pinned out and i'm waiting for the idea to settle in my head about exactly how i'm going to quilt that and then there'll be some videos about that the knitting i've got on really really well with knitting the little jumper for me i'm i'm just about on the finishing the neck and the sleeves now so you will see that but what i'd say is never worry that i've stopped doing these projects i haven't it's just how i like to work i like to have a lot of projects on the go at any one time and i like to have a lot of materials around me so that i get inspired by fabrics you know i wouldn't have dreamt of starting this project if i hadn't got all these scrap back boxes out to talk about the the bunting that i did for the tate and so um yeah so if the way that i work drives you crazy i'm really sorry suits me because i'm doing a lot of other things behind the scenes you'll have seen the first video about the project that i've been doing with my son john and and three very very talented women that one's all going to be you're going to see those videos for the next few weeks and so john and i made that video for you introducing that project so i'm busy with that kind of thing and there's always things behind the scenes that i'm busy with so uh forgive me if my style of working drives you around the bend it really really suits me i've also you'll have a bit of a butterfly mind i think you might have noticed by now so but what i do want to tell you about is i finished stitching agnes's quilt hand stitching and that was a hexagon project that was ongoing for a couple of years i mean i'm at the hand quilting stage now but there's no more hand piecing to do so i'm researching my next hand piecing project which again will be another thing that might take a couple of years to do i've got two patterns that i'm auditioning in my head about which one i want to spend that amount of time with and what sort of fabric to use and all of that but there is going to be another hand pieced project coming up soon so i'm going to carry on now and sub cut all of these all of these these are the two by two by twos now four two by fours i'm going to sub cut these into these until i've got a whole box full of these things and then i'm going to go over to the sewing machine and just randomly pick two out and stitch them together and stitch and stitch and stitch and sometimes i don't do any machine sewing for quite a while because there's all sorts of other things going on or i'm enjoying hand stitching and then when i get behind the sewing machine there's a sort of like a realization oh i've really missed this because i i said to anna the other day who is my daughter-in-law who helps me edit all these videos and uh i said to her do you know anna this is my favorite seat in the house my sewing machine seat it's a fantastic sewing machine that dukey and i really really like it and it's going like a dream i should touch wood shouldn't i because soon it'll stop doing that but i am i love nothing more than to sit at that seat there with some good music on or something going on in the background a bit of noise an audio book or something and then just do a repetitive stitching task like this it makes me very very happy indeed i love it but then i also love hand stitching and i also love knitting and all those other things that i like to do but the project that i'm calling the back porch because prosaically that's where it is it's it's going to be painted guess what color yeah hands up if you said pink i'm going to paint that little area pink this room is painted green the kitchen's painted pink so i think i'll just carry on with the pink through there i love the pink painted walls they're almost like a a warm hug on a cold day and so i'm going to paint the walls through there and then sort of tidy up the woodwork a bit because really um it's just been a like a a mud room a boots room for a long long time and i'm hoping to make it into a really nice little entrance way into the back part of the house so curtains will be going up i'll be painting the wood for the poles i'll be sanding the woodwork a bit and refinishing that i've got a cupboard now there's there's a thing i've got an ikea build to do i'm putting that off i can do ikea builds i can i've proved this many times but i've got to be in the right frame of mind and then i ordered some a small piece it's a small area a small piece of vinyl flooring that i'm going to put down there and as soon as that comes i'll show you because i'm very excited about that one now when i talk to you about all of these things i make extra video to post over on patreon and one of the things that i do is and this is just new this year is my diary my monthly diary and so i collect little snippets of video from all the things that i'm doing and i so i'm going to about to make the diary for this month and post it at the end of the month and um so the the diaries are there uh it's a long thing hour-long thing about me rambling on about little snippets of things i've done through the month and that's the available there for the five dollar tier and then the ten dollar tier get my um behind the scenes outtakes um less edited uh kind of um videos every friday and at the moment for that ten dollar tier we're doing a repost anna and i of all the make alongs that were published for the 20 last year and so they're all being released on a weekly basis for that tier as well so that's a double why me for the ten dollar tier what can you buy for ten dollars you can probably buy a really good craft magazine can't you well you can get eight videos plus one diary with no ads what can you buy for five dollars a posh coffee maybe in a coffee shop well you can get my hour-long monthly roundup every month plus all the previous um videos for those levels right back to the beginning of 2019 so i think that's a pretty good deal but i want to thank everybody who's still watching uh very much indeed for subscribing to this channel my youtube analytics tell me that only half of you are subscribed so come on you other half click the subscribe and the notifications bell especially the notifications bell then you won't miss when i post the um special project that we've been doing anna and i and john uh all summer uh click the notifications bell leave me a comment the comments i read them all i answer as many as i can and um the comments were really really helpful in helping me decide how to proceed with the han 10 jacket the burro jacket i changed my mind a lot because of some of the comments that came through there so i read them and i take note of them i really do and so thank you very much indeed for engaging i think of my comments section as my lime green sofa which is where all you lovely subscribers are sitting down there on the sofa talking to one another you can also nip over to facebook and actually share your your creative beautiful creations and your thoughts and ideas with a lot of other people on the facebook line green sofa where the admins there will welcome you warmly and treat you very well indeed thank you admins anyway that was a very long bit there um i hope you've enjoyed watching this i'm looking forward to showing you how i now piece this together because it's a very simple block to make and i think it's a great stash buster you know because it doesn't matter what you put together i haven't even i haven't really looked at the colors as i've been picking them out or the patterns or the or the shapes of the patterns just sticking together once they're all mashed up like this they look great so this is definitely not a design thing like agnes's quilt this is like a um it's a big mixture of all my scraps i'll see you next time thanks so much for watching bye now [Music] you

Channel: The Last Homely House

Views: 102,510

Keywords: TUTORIAL, PAOSTAGE STAMP BLOCK, quilting, quilt block, sewing, fabric, machine sewing, the last homely house, Kate at the last homely house

Id: 2MVES9nHqek

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022