Postage Stamp Quilt Series - Little Squares Method - Episode 1

hi everyone it's me Darlene I am here with a new quilt series I am so excited I promise to finish I have been wanting to do this for a while but there's just been so much going on in my life that I just keep putting it off and today I just woke up saying I want to do this I want to start it I'm going to make it a series I'm going to show you different ways to do it whatever tips I pick up along the way and we will get it done except I will be making a quilt top only which will eventually be on eBay I assume unless I fall in love with it I think I might fall in love with it but I also know I don't need it it'll most likely end up on eBay when it's all done I am going to attempt a postage stamp quilt an actual postage stamp quilt is made up of individual little squares that you put together and years ago they would hand so that and the squares are one and a half inches square so that when they're all sewn together with a quarter inch seam allowance you're finished little blocks inside the quilt are one inch blocks you know they they would look like one inch so you start with one and a half I am starting with two inch blocks I'm kind of sad that I'm not making them with smaller blocks because I just think it would be so cool but I've been cutting some scraps for months and making little stacks of two inch squares so I'm going to use those I could cut them down but we're just gonna go ahead with two inch squares and it'll make it you know that much faster however we don't have to start with just squares and I'll be talking to you about that I'm going to show you three methods that I will be doing to put this whole thing together one is with squares individual squares the other is with strip sets and the other is just with bigger blocks that you can put together and you can do it that way too so I'm gonna do one method today the little squares if you were to do a two-inch you know start with two inch squares and you want like a 40 by 60 quilts top or quilt you're gonna need 1200 of those little suckers so you can see that that's a lot of squares and it's going to go much faster by not having to cut all those and so all those together it'll be much faster with strip sets or even with the block method that I'm going to show you in another video but the cool thing is is sometimes I feel like just taking scraps and cutting it into squares and I still can do that and it'll go in the pile of squares I can use all three methods in one quilt I'm assuming I'm going to try I will do my best now let's just think about all those little intersections you're not going to get them all lined up I don't care if you're an expert you're not going to get them all lined up and with that many intersections would we really want to stress out over that I mean you would never get through it this is maybe a little daunting for someone who's just starting and has been told you need to line up those intersections don't worry about it how about this let's just say we're going to try to make a postage stamp quilt that is all just slightly off if you were to do it with just the strip set method like I will show you later you can purposely do rows and offset them so that no intersections match at all like you know this row the intersection would be like in the center of the the row on top of it but I'm not going to do that it's very hard to do like long strips of little narrow things and keep it even it's best that things end up going into four patches and then 16 patches just get it through your head now your intersections are not all going to match and that is okay let's just say we're aiming for that all right I give you permission to aim for that the other thing is you know there's a lot of seams in the back and so we will try to have seams Ness please don't think you need to go and press all the seams open because again you you'll never get through it so I'm going to be doing a lot of finger pressing and I will make some attempts to make the seams nest just so there's a little bit less bulk but there's times that I'm just going to want the block in a certain orientation and it's not going to allow for nesting seams and I don't care the other thing is you know when we go under the foot sometimes underneath the seam will like flip and again that's bound to happen now and then it's certainly going to with me and I'm not going to worry about it but I will be a little bit more careful than usual when I'm going under the foot to make sure that that bottom seam is not flipping I think that's all I want to tell you up front I have no clue how many episodes this will be but I'm just going to start I will work on it and then I'll show you the next method and then the next method and somewhere along the way we will get it wrapped up so let's go over to my sewing table I'm going to start out by showing you how I cut my scrappy squares with no precision at all and you can see some of these I have quite a few of the same print I think now what I would have done when I had a lot of fabric like that is probably just do a strip set and only cut little squares if my piece is too small for a strip set let me just show you not sure about this angle and also I noticed that my fingernails were a hot mess with like half polish on half off so I don't know if you noticed that in the intro if you're going to see that or not but I took my polish off all right let's say you have a little piece like this left over that's not really big enough for a strip set so what I'm going to do is my scissors and guess what I did get myself a new little rotary cutter I'm gonna like this little one so much better although I have to remember to make it so that the blade is safe is locked I like this little one so much better I don't know I might actually like it but this I would never use a rotary cutter just to cut a piece of scrap so what I do is first I'm going to trim you know put the length the long end on my two-inch line or a little bit you know beyond it I don't cut to an exact two inches I want it to be at least two inches or a little bit more I worry about all the trimming later so I'm just going to put it on my two-inch line and I'm just going to use the edge of my mat and I trim like that so now we have two inches at least this way and now I'm going to just put that line on any line I'm going to just trim the end now this end is nice and straight think it out so I'm going to turn it I'm going to put it on my two-inch line make sure you you know you have your one and one here in the corner and trim and my mat you know it there's a little bit even after so it's actually a little bit more than two inches and I like that and here hmm Wow cutting it close just a little bit right there there's my two little blocks that I would just put in my stash now let's say you have a piece like this now this is you know a long strip you can do just the same thing if you want you could you know cut a piece that's more manageable and you know make it 2 inches this way and then you know take a straight edge and you know just cut cut cut or you can double it you know so you have less cutting to do like this you know just make your ends match up and you know just cut two at a time like this let's get two of those hat now in this case I didn't trim lengthwise right away but got a nice straight edge on this side so let's just turn it and voila I have two more that I like now you're just going to take two pieces any two now we're going to do string piecing so let's take one like this one like this I don't care that they're bigger than two inches all I'm going to do is take like two sides that look pretty straight and I'm going to line up the top and this side on the right now you can see one is extending well I don't know if you can see but the bottom fabric is extending that's okay we're good at the top we're good on one side and I'm going to just follow the edge of my foot which is a quarter inch seam allowance for me I don't know what your foot does but it doesn't really matter as long as it's like as consistent as possible so you just do what works for you I still don't go back and forth at the beginning and the end don't have time for that so I am using a fairly short stitch just so they don't all unravel at the ends I stop with my foot still on the fabric and I'm just going to grab two more let's do strawberries and a stripe don't get fussy as to what you're putting together I'm only being a little bit fussy right now because I actually want to make a sixteen patch so I want to make sure I have enough variety other than that if I was just doing this on my own I would just take a whole stack of things that are all the same color and just match them up with other things so now I'm just going to put it like kind of close to the next one and I'm just going to go right past this one onto the next two more and I'm going to just keep going it really goes fast you wouldn't think it does but it does and it's just I just like it it's very much like crumb quilting only this is more planned it's not as wonky but with me my postage stamp quilt top will be wonky because I'm not into like you know having everything be perfect even if I was into it I would never accomplish that so I just rather pretend that I purposely do things the way I do things I do want to say if you think you'd like to try this but you don't have a big variety of fabrics I have penny auctions all the time for scrappy pre-cuts usually it's like eight bigger pieces and I always say in the description that they can be cut down for postage stamps some of the pieces are big enough that you could probably get for postage stamp-sized or you know for two inch squares out of the Scrappy's so do go check out my penny auctions the link is always down below please please go check them out and I was hoping that this would give you guys you know an idea as to how you can use those Scrappy's okay I'm addicted to this I'm addicted but I'm going to stop now because I do believe I have enough let's do one more now I'm just going to snip and then I'm just going to take these apart okay I haven't figured out the best way to do that yet I think this way is best pull it toward me pull it toward me there now I'm going to take two well one one two patch going to open it and I'm going to just finger press now I'm going to see first which is my straighter edge this edge is I'm going to start with this down but what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that the seam on the back is going in this direction not up but down like the raw edge toward me so that it won't flip up so that's gonna be the bottom because like when I go over this it if I go this way it it flips that and I don't want that this is where I'm going to try to always nest so that's gonna go this way and in this case I'm going to flip this up and just finger press also leaving that right there I'm just going to pass two more through I think that's all the ones I made it should be enough to make my 16 patch we're about to find out and I am going to just finger press these two and at this point I don't care which way it doesn't matter because we have no clue which direction this is going to go in so I just open it and it kind of usually has a way it wants to go and I go with it alright I press these really quick and this is the first time I'm going to trim now if you started with actual two inch squares your little four patch should be three and a half inches square remember we lose a half an inch when there's a seam so if you want to make it easy and you want to start with two inch blocks you know just trim them down to two inches in the first place don't be like me and have an extra step like I said I like the wiggle room so here's how I'm going to trim these I am putting the seen on one of my lines I'm actually going to double up on that because it doesn't have to be like so perfect so I'm going to put another one I'm having a hard time doing this with one hand like that and then another one up here you do whatever you're comfortable with I want to trim to three and a half inches half of that is 1.75 inches one in three quarters so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my ruler and I'm going to put the number two on the center line where is it up there it's hard to see with my big thing with my bar but I'm gonna show you alright so I have the number two on that seam see the seam as the number two but now that's two inches I need to knock off another quarter of an inch so I'm going to just move the bar down one quarter of an inch and I'm going to just cut along this side and I did that that side is straight now I have to do the same I have to go an inch and 3/4 right there and I'm going to trim that off and I did that and then I accidentally took them off forgetting that I have to turn them so I don't know if I put them right back in the exact place so now I'm going to turn them and I'm going to put the seam on a line and I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to go 1 and 3/4 inch out 1 and 3/4 inch out and trim those sides now we have four of these little buggers and we're going to put them together so I'm just going to try not to make any too exact things touch I don't care if there's two of the same in the 16-patch I don't mind that at all how about like that whew like that let's say let's turn it one more time okay that's all looking good to me I like it we're going with that so I'm going to put this one here this one here and I'm going to send them through one after the other and we just trimmed these so don't worry too much about the intersections just make a match up the best you can so now I'm going to open these up and press press and I'm going to sew them together like that like this and we have our first 16-patch at this point I'm not really going to bother trimming when I look at it I can tell if there's something funky going on like there's something funky going on right here but I'm just going to wait when I put them together maybe this will be on an outer edge and I won't have to worry about it right now I don't like to do something now if it doesn't absolutely have to be done now so I'm just going to make a bunch of these sixteen patches using all these little squares that I had cut but I'm the way to go is the next method that I will be showing you which is with strip sets so please subscribe so you don't miss out and I will be back with more soon I'll show you how many of these I got done in the next video and then I'll show you the next step thanks for watching bye you

Channel: Darlene Michaud

Views: 113,416

Rating: 4.8925648 out of 5

Keywords: Darlene Michaud, Sanford Maine, darlene michaud ebay, postage stamp quilt, postage stamp quilt tutorial, postage stamp quilt pattern, postage stamp quilt youtube, darlene michaud quilt, darlene michaud quilting, darlene michaud quilt tutorial, how to make a postage stamp quilt, how to make a traditional postage stamp quilt, what is a postage stamp quilt, 2 inch squares quilt, tiny block quilts, strip set postage stamp quilt, easy postage stamp quilt, postage stamp quilt blocks

Id: ioXgtbbOAv8

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019