QUILT AS YOU GO STRING QUILT: With My Cover Strips On The Back! (Beginner & Scrap Friendly)

so i really love scrappy string quilts i'm always checking them out on pinterest and i especially love the ones with the diamonds i've always wanted to make one and i only make quilter to go quilts and i thought those blocks aren't going to look good joined together with either the joining strip method or the color strip on the front so i thought i'm going to give it a go but this time i'm going to put the cover strip on the back just so that we don't have any strips in between the blocks i also have the question in our private facebook group can the cover strips go onto the back and i thought let's give it a go and see what happens by the way i wasn't sure what the term string quilt meant but it turns out there are no strings involved it's just a quilt that's made from leftover strips of fabric and they can be any width that you like so there's no pattern for this quilt it's just a fun quilt that i'm making up as we go along so let's get started your blocks can be any size that you like i'm using 10 inch squares and i'm going to make a quilt with 16 blocks so that's going to give me four blocks across and four blocks down now as this is a scrappy quilt every backing square can be a different fabric although i'm using the one fabric next step is to cut your batting so the batting is cut 9 inches and it's centered onto your 10 inch square giving you a half inch gap all the way around the edge i'm using a nice flat low loft batting and i've held my backing and batting together with a light application of basting spray to make the kite shape template draw up a 10 inch square measure from one corner across four and a quarter inches and then connect that mark with the opposite corner this is now your template here and you can cut that out or you can cut it out with template plastic and then cut out your kite sections so can you just use ordinary interfacing to join your batting strips together well you can if you're using a very light interfacing this is an interfacing that i had a pack of it's a violin g785 and you can see how thin this interfacing is so i've cut two inch strips and let's see if it works so you can see how fine this interfacing is and here's my two inch strip now it's only fusible on one side that's all we need i'm going to butt up my two edges of the batting together like that position the batting joining tape over the top and it's always a good idea to iron with a cloth over the top so i'm happy with that i just need to cut one more square now i've cut strips from my stash and i've cut them in different sizes ranging from two and a half inches i've got some one and a half inches and i've also got some two inch pieces so basically your strips can be any size and it's really good when they're different sizes because you don't have to worry about anything lining up with this block what i like to do then is put them in an order in which they all look nice next to their neighbour and as i sew i rotate through all of the strips using different sizes of course but this way it means that i'm going to use all of my strips evenly to get ready to sew position one of your kite shaped pieces in the center of a block lining up exactly those side edges and we want also want to line up the point in the corner in the opposite corner so what i do there to make sure that it's going to stay in place i'm just using a little bit of fabric glue just to hold that in place and then i'm using two pins at the sewing machine i have a white thread on top and on the bottom because that's going to tie in with my back of my block i have my size 80 quilting needle i'm just using a standard foot and i've moved my needle position over so that i'm going to have a quarter inch seam and i have a stitch length of three so i'm just going to start with my fabrics here i'm going to take my first one and i'm going to place it right sides together with the edge of my center kite shape and it's another stitching and flipping block so here's my first strip right sides together with the center kite shape you only need to extend the strip about a quarter of an inch past the edge of your backing square and we're going to sew flip the strip over to the right side and it's up to you you can press as you go or you can just keep sewing i like to press as i go at this stage roughly cut away the excess of the strips and then sew the strips onto the other side if you've just discovered this channel i'm monica poole i'm a designer and sewing tutor from australia i post a video every week showing how i make my quilts quilt as you go plus other sewing adventures if you'd like to learn with me subscribe to pattern pool tv and click the notification button so that you don't miss a video you're also welcome to join our private facebook page and if you get a chance head to our website and sign up for our weekly newsletter give the block one final press before we trim it to size flip the block over and now trim it to the same size as the backing square you will notice that the block has shrunk slightly my block is now measuring just a fraction less than 10 inches but because we're going to stitch and quilt each block in exactly the same way they should all shrink to the same size now continue making all of your blocks like this mixing it up between the width of your strips and all of your different fabrics that you have so our center sections are a little bit too big to leave free of quilting so now i'm going to show you a neat trick on how we can do this to mark up our quilting line i'm going to use some painting tape or you could just use normal masking tape so this is one inch wide i'm first of all going to use a piece to position it against a top edge and then a piece against the side edge now this might not make sense just yet but it will i'm just going to mark a line now that is a quarter of an inch away from the edges the inner edges and now i'm going to mark or use another piece of tape and line it up on the quarter inch line i'm now going to position a piece of tape along one side edge and a another piece of tape along another side edge i like to make sure that my tape is all overlapping and i'll explain that to you in a minute now what we have is a smaller kite shape that we're going to quilt so to quilt this you could use your walking foot if you want to i'm actually just going to use my open toe foot and that way i can easily see where i'm sewing and so the idea is just to stitch along the edge of the masking tape without sewing through it i also don't like to start and finish on a corner because i feel that's a little bit messy so i like to start somewhere you know in a non-obvious place on one of the side edges so there's that all quilted now i can continue using my tape as a stencil and i'm going to peel that off all the way there's my quilting and now i'm just going to position this onto another block and just continue quilting all of my blocks in the same way so that's as easy as it is to make these blocks so continue on and make as many as you like okay so at this stage i've made eight blocks but i just wanted to show you that four blocks go together to make a star this would make a great cushion and if you turn them around you'll get a cross shape but now that i have eight blocks i'm going to join my blocks together in two rows of four blocks so normally with my easy cover strip method i would join them with the backs facing but this time i'm going to join them with the fronts facing and i'm going to take a one centimeter or three eighths of an inch seam [Music] allowance [Music] so i'm now going to press all of the seams open so taking that bigger seam allowance means that my seam will sit nice and open and flat and if your batting moved and you sewed a little bit through the batting that's fine that's why i say use a nice flat low loft batting and if you ended up having a little tiny gap between your stitching line and the batting that's okay too because all of that is filled in with the thickness of the seam so we had a question in our facebook group can you use pre-made one-inch bias for your cover strips and the answer to that is yes provided that the bias was made from 100 cotton patchwork fabric and that the raw edges meet exactly in the center on the back of your bias strip don't use a poly cotton binding where the edges don't meet in the center because it's just going to be too thin and you'll be able to see the seam through it so that's what i'm going to use for this one and i'm going to do something a little bit different instead of using strips of fusible wear i'm actually going to position my strips in place using a sew line glue pen you can also use roxanne's glue based now before i'm going to apply these cover strips i need to make sure that they're going to be perfectly centered because we're going to stitch these cover strips onto the back and the stitching lines we want them to look like quilting lines that are sewn half an inch away from the seam on the front so i'm going to mark my line which is half an inch away from the center of the seam i'm using my sew line marker and make sure that you push your marker in towards the ruler so that your line doesn't grow and you have a nice accurate line i'm actually going to mark this line on both sides normally i just do it on the one side but i'm going to do it on both sides because i want to make sure that my cover strip is going to be like because i want to make sure that my cover strip is going to be perfectly centered now what i'm going to do is just use the glue i'm just going to run that along the raw seam just like that and my cover strips are always cut half an inch shorter at both ends and i do that to reduce the bulk in the adjoining seam now making sure that my cover strip is perfectly centered just using my lines i'm going to just smooth that in place and you can also give that a little bit of an iron just to speed up the drying process and i'll continue applying my cover strips onto each of the seams to sew my cover strips on i'm using an edge stitching foot that's got the guide in the center and i've moved the needle position over slightly so that i'm going to have a distance of about a bit less than eighth of an inch or about two millimeters away from the guide and i'm using a color thread that looks good on the back and is also going to look nice on the actual front so after you sew your first row of stitching turn it over and make sure that your tension is nice and adjust if necessary the other important thing about this is that it's very very important to start your stitching at the very top of the block with a tiny reverse stitch and at the very end of the block because that is going to get caught into the seam allowance so if you do a little reverse stitch where the actual cover strip starts you're going to see that on the front of the quilt so just making sure that stitching is started and finished right at the very top and bottom of your work wow i'm really happy with that that does look like quilting line sewn half an inch away from the seam you can see my little beginning and ending there where i've done my reverse stitch it it's a little bit knotty so that will get caught into the same and you can see it on this seam here so i'm very happy with that now what i'm going to do is i've already joined another row together and i'm going to join these two rows together so i've got two rows complete and now i'm going to join them together once again with the right sides facing so when i pin this i want to make sure that my stitching lines are going to line up so popping my pins in across ways at each stitching line [Music] so flipped it over to the front and i've got to say i'm quite happy with how my stitching lines are matching up so i'm glad i took the time to pin that so now i'm just going to repeat the process and apply my cover strip onto my long seam and you'll see that it's not bulky at the joins because my cover strip finished half an inch away from the seam [Music] so i've got my two rows joined together this is what it looks like from the front i absolutely love it and this is what it looks like from the back it looks very cute from the back also i absolutely love how this quilt has come together and my stitching lines that attach the cover strips on the back they just look like quilting lines sewn half an inch away from the seam on the front of the quilt so my only advice would be not to use light fabrics in this section here say like a white just in case the batting didn't quite meet where the stitching line of the seam is and you might end up having a bit of a shadow showing through of where there's a gap of batting so i'm going to keep working on my quilt when it's finished i'll put a picture in our private facebook group and also on the youtube community page i hope you enjoyed this video thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Pattern Poole TV

Views: 44,669

Rating: 4.9455781 out of 5

Keywords: string quilt tutorial, string quilts scrap quilting, string quilt free pattern, string quilts with style, how to quilt as you go, quilt as you go beginner block, pattern poole, monica poole quilt as you go, easy quilt blocks for beginners, easy quilt blocks that look difficult, how to make a quilt for beginners, your first quilt, beginner quilt pattern, how to quilt as you go a large quilt, quilt as you go for beginners, quilt blocks patterns, quilt as you go made modern book

Id: Lpg9g9oxzng

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021