Scrap buster #1: String Quilt on muslin foundation

hello welcome to my channel the main rule for the quilting is that there are no rules you will learn you will watch others and you will find the methods and ways of quilting that works for you and that's the most important thing because you need to find what works for you to be able to enjoy the process what you will see is my process of working with different materials and different designs and i hope some of those tips and tricks will help you in your own journey so one of the recent challenges we had in our quilting group which is southampton you uk quilters was to create a very small quilt for the project liners the size was given 20 by 24 inches red finished and also it was supposed to be full quilt which is three layers top butting and backing so for my project i have chosen to make a string piecing quilt i've got a foundation piecing muslin which is very very thin cotton muslin which is great for for string piecing and i will show you later a bigger blocks as well this is cut to ten and a half inches which means you can do any blocks from that size down i usually kind of um cut my muslin squares to about inch wider than i want to have a block uh squared up just so to make it easier for myself so with ten and a half you can go anything between nine and a half down um because the the quilt was uh calling for 20 by 24 inches ready i've decided to go with four and a half by four and a half inches uh squares and then obviously once they sewn they will be four inches so i took my ten and a half inches and i made a four foundation piecing squares out of one this is what i was starting from and i did want to have a one strip in the middle the same in all of the blocks so how i go about my string piecing blocks is i'll cut as many squares as i need to finish my my quad so whatever size block you will choose just cut as many as you need or you know you may decide to go with the big ones then leave them as is or just trim them little bit to what you need why i'm doing it in one go is because then i will chain piece all of those blocks in one go as well you just make it much easier and quicker and then you have also much less ironing to do which is what i don't like to do so i'm trying to in any work i do i'm trying to eliminate as many ironing steps as possible so um that's how i go about it so this is going to be a strip which is one and a half inches which will be my middle and then i will be adding from various boxes of different leftovers those are the the shared fabric i also got some other bits and pieces from other projects i'll be adding to the site um other pieces they not necessarily cut all to that one and a half inch there might be other sizes all even just really scrappy ones which are not cut to any size whatsoever they will be used as well and for the ends if needed i can i can use some leftover rectangle squares or literally just scraps so it's very very scrappy friendly project in any size to be fair so let me just walk you through through one of the uh squares or one of the set of the squares how i do i will just do it for two but like i said just cut as many as you as you want to do decide on your layout decide on your on your design whether you want to have something in the middle the same or different or at least the same shade i will show you later bigger squares i did for different quilts which had uh white in the middle but to be fair with the string coils the the the possibility are endless so for this project i don't use my quarter inch food because it's really irrelevant what the seam allowance is going to be i will just use the edge of the foot as my guidance on the width uh if you think whatever your foot you've got it's too big if you can maybe move your needle move it if not maybe find different food which gives you better gauge or just eyeball it honestly it's not going to show at all anyway so it's quite nice and flexible project to do okay so so obviously this square as i said is bigger than what i need so i don't have to worry to make sure that this covers the edge also so just more or less on diagonal the first strip and then we'll be adding the second one which let's go with this blue but what i don't want to do is waste my time and my fabric and my thread to go over what i need so i've trimmed the fabric and those beads they could go in another black block on the end so just keep all the scraps you might find them useful to finish another block so here we go what i would suggest is because you will be trimming that block later just get the stitch length a little bit shorter maybe two or one eight depends what what setting you can get on your machine just shorten it up a little bit okay so i finish sewing first one and i'll go straight with the second one so you would do that ex for all of the squares you have got for how many you need make sure the first strip is your um right side up at the second strip you will be adding to the side will be right side down so this is this is not actual strip which is cut to any size this is left over and it will work nicely as well as far as the width of that strip is at least an inch i'm fine with that so let me add it into the side now with the shared fabric the good thing is either side is fine on most of the in most of the cases so you don't even have to worry about that so i sew a little bit i will stop and now i will trim my my size some to make sure i've got the left of it to another block okay so if i if i said i had i would need i don't know 40 blocks 45 or whatever number is i'll just carry on with chain piecing on the end i'll cut the thread [Music] i would not even cut in between the pieces what i would do just move that fabric away the one which was sewn first go back to your middle piece and add another strip let's see what we've got here yeah this red one will look nice against this again this is a cut off from um when i was cutting the strip so it's not even but it doesn't matter so i just other than i stop i will trim to the size remove the away the first strip and i will add another one i can put this one again because this is different to the previous one and you know when if you if you made more of those blocks you you know you will be putting them somewhere in different corners of the quilt anyway so it's fine you go so you did all of the row of whatever amount of the squares you had then you will go to the iron board and in one go you would iron those two things away to make it nice and flat and i will do it now i'll come back to to the next round of the sewing okay so i've ironed my blocks nice and flat let's get on with the next pass so again cut off it's not really even but it doesn't matter so i don't have to start from the top i'll start somewhere here a little bit of flannel just on the subject of the flannel because um you know when you're buying a a secondhand um shirt to use for the projects or you may find uh in one of the bundles i sell in my ebay shop sometimes on the right hand side they are very used you can say you know that it doesn't look so great just use the left side as your right side this one is perfectly fine so this is nothing to worry about just turning around and you have perfectly fine surface and i've added the strips to both of the sides i'll go back to iron now and have a look if i need to add more or maybe on one of the sides i'm done already you shall see here you go so i still need to add corners here and i think on this side i'm fine here i will need one corner here so we finished covering the space of the foundation piece so we know the side the blocks are at least four and a half inches which is what we needed for our project i've got small ruler which is five inches which i can use to cut it but if you had have a bigger one just make sure you have the diagonal line here because that will help you to kind of square it up with the with the middle piece if you have even bigger uh ruler what i would suggest you can use this type of tape that the painters tape to kind of highlight how big your block is so it will be easier for you to square it up so let me just add it quickly and i'll show you how you can work out on that so that's four and a half here and then one and a half this side there you go so this is the square we're working uh towards two so i just need to make sure that where my four and a half inches are i've got the fabric that i eyeball more or less the middle of the block i can turn around the block or if you have a smaller um cutting cutting mat you can use it to just turn around the block on that smaller cutting mat but then again you come here make sure you square up on this side let me just move it into on the angle a little bit so that's my four and a half here that's my four and a half there [Music] you go perfectly square four and a half block and you just do it with all the blocks you you've made so let me just quickly show you a bigger blocks i've made before so this is the stack of the blocks i've made before for a different quilt i haven't finished it yet this block is eight and a half inches because that's the size of the ruler i've got really it makes very very uh convenient if the block you want to square to is the the size of the ruler you have so i've got multiple rulers just to make my life easy but i haven't bought them in one go i did buy them over the time the first rule i bought was 12 and a half inches because that's that you know you can cut any size from that so you just start from there but as you progress you probably may have some preference about the size of the blocks you like working with so if you do just buy the ruler with that size it will make your life much easier so you see those blocks are eight and a half and i kept the white strip in the middle but that strip is not the same with in all of those blocks and and it's fine so you just work with what you have and you can see the strips i've used are different width as well in some cases when i've run out of the of the strip i will just put some pieces together you can see there's one two three four different fabrics pieced together to make one strip and that looks good very good too because it just adds a variety i had some strips made on the counting tape again some left leftovers so i've added it as well how it does again here a few few bits sewn together or it may have been a crumb block i've just trimmed to the size it was left off left over from chrome block so whatever you have you can use for those blocks it's quite um you know the more you add to it it actually looks better so i can hear crumb block left over widths are different those are two and a half those will be two and this some will will be like i said some cutters which were not even even something like that goes into it as far as i've got at least that an inch width so you have this half an inch in your quilt more or less it's fine and because you're not using the quarter inch foot for that if the the strip is narrower you just make smaller seam allowance that's why it's i said uh narrowed narrow down the length of the stitch because that will help to keep the fabric if the um the seam you're using is smaller so this is the finished quilt i've used one two three four one two three four five so 20 um [Music] 24 and a half inches a strip squares and then on the edges i've added just two and a half by four and a half just to frame a little more but again those are all scraps none of them are the same all over so what i will do now i will um sandwich it and i will quilt quilted so what i will use for quilting this one is actually i would do it on my normal machine on the jukie because i would like to use some decorative stitches here and here it is finished mini quilt this is a mini quilt however it will make great wall hanging if you wish to if you you can make it as a table topper or put it on the top of the chest of drawers you can make a cushion covers placemats uh anything and everything really doesn't have to be quilt so if i want to do a big quilt i'll probably go with bigger squares because it will be quicker to make but all the mini ones they're really looking good so for any smaller projects i would definitely recommend it thanks for watching this video if you liked what you saw please subscribe to my channel to support my work for further inspiration and examples of my work you can check my instagram or facebook page happy creating

Channel: Pola Quilting

Views: 1,611

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: scrappy quilt tutorial, scrappy quilt block, quilting tutorial, machine quilting, quilting, quilting tips, sewing tutorial, scrappy quilting tutorial, quilt tutorial, quilting scraps, how to use scraps in quilting, scraps for quilting, best way to use quilting scraps, scrappy block, scrappy quilting block, quilting block from scraps, easy quilting, Patchwork, Scrap buster

Id: hNkan7EsH_w

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021