Simple Quilt using 2 1/2 inch STRIPS! First in a series of scrappy projects to use your stash!

it started out cute just saving leftover strips of the same size two and a half inches wide to use in a future project the bin started out smaller and then got bigger and bigger until finally it was an overgrown mess and it was taking up too much space it's time to tame the strips and make some great quilts along the way this is the first quilt we're going to make in a series that's going to use all two and a half inch strips of fabric so I'm going to make as many quilts as I need to to use up most of the fabric in these buckets I want to kind of get it down to one bucket so it's a little bit more manageable for the first quilt in this series we're going to make a simple rail fence quilt with just two rails I'm digging through the bucket to find all different shades of blue and green light green dark green aqua blue light blue dark blue doesn't matter all sorts of Blues and greens are going to go into this quilt I'm trying to stay away from Fabrics that have a lot of other colors in them just trying to stick mostly with the blues and the greens but there are a few where I thought the colors weren't very noticeable so I did include those I'm also not paying any attention to how long the strips are as long as they're over four and a half inches in length when I'm putting the pieces together as long as they're two and a half inches wide almost any length will work until we get this bucket under control I will be putting out one video a month using two and a half inch strips of fabric and it'll all be Scrappy so that I can use what I have in my buckets and they will sometimes use specialty rulers but most often it'll just be things that you already have once I found enough strips in my colorway I'm just going to head to the sewing machine and take the whole pile with me if I wanted to I could press them all flat first to make them a little easy to work with but I'm not going to let a few wrinkles stop me from sewing I'm just going to start sewing these together right sides together with a quarter inch seam allowance some of the strips are leftover binding strips and have seams in them I'm going to ignore the seams and treat them as one long strip as I sew I'll sew shorter strips onto longer strips until I can't sew any longer I will cut them apart later the idea is to just keep sewing one thing I'm going to try to keep in mind is to stay away from sewing strips together that are too much alike I want there to be some contrast between the two Fabrics so like a light blue to a dark blue or a green to a blue something along those lines this is the kind of sewing that I really love that kind of no thought sewing you just keep sewing Fabrics together you don't really even have to think about it there's no math there's nothing to distract you you just get to sew so enjoy the process if you want a quilt that's a little bit less Scrappy and a little more cohesive you could try using a couple of jelly rolls to make this project you can either buy two of the same jelly roll or you could buy two jelly rolls that are different but have similar colors in them and would look good together I could have picked any color combo other combos that I considered were blue and yellow using all red making a pastel version with like light yellow green pink blue and purple or using my Christmas prints that were all in the bucket really you can pick anything you want once you're done sewing you can cut the pieces apart I cut them apart wherever there were breaks in the fabric so they turned out to be all sorts of different lengths and then you just need to press I'm going to press in One Direction usually towards the dark fabric if you like patterns and ideas for two and a half inch strips make sure to hit that like button and subscribe we'll be putting out one video every month until my strips all fit in one bucket I use some Mary Ellen's best press spray in places where the pieces had been binding so they'd been folded in half and pressed I needed to get that line out of the strip and then I could get it to lay flat now that I've got all my pieces pressed it is time to move on to cutting if all your strips were two and a half inches and your seam was a quarter inch they should all measure four and a half inches wide so we're going to cut our squares four and a half inches wide I like to layer my pieces I try to get them as straight as I can and then I use my bigger ruler my Square I cut at the nine inch Mark and then I cut at the four and a half inch Mark so I can make multiple Cuts without having to move the fabric make sure you straighten the one Edge before you start cutting if when you get done sewing and pressing your strip sets don't come out to be four and a half inches wide let's say they're all four and a quarter inches wide instead of cutting all your pieces four and a half inches wide at this point you'd want to cut them all at four and a quarter you just want to end up with a square to be able to sew squares to squares to help me keep track of how many blocks I have I usually take safety pins and I will pin 10 blocks together so I have sets of ten and then when I am trying to figure out how big I want to make my quilt I know how many blocks I have and I can kind of do the math and figure out how big my quilt should be I was attempting to make this quilt turn out to be about 64 inches by 80 inches so I knew I would need 320 blocks so I wanted to get them into sets of 10 to make them a little easier to count so I needed 32 sets of 10. I actually ended up having a little bit more than what I had planned on so my quilt actually turned out to be 16 rows across and 23 rows down the finished size turned out to be 64 by 92. I find it hard to throw away those last little bits of those strip sets so I would trim them down to whatever size I could get out of them including seam allowances and I had an idea for something I could put together at the end and use up all those extra little bits now that we have all our blocks cut it's time to start sewing them together we're going to start by sewing them into sets of two as you sew your two pieces together make sure that one of the seams is vertical and one of the seams is horizontal and make sure you sew all of the sets the same exact way as we sew we're going to start with sets of two and then we will go to sets of four sets of eight and then finally rows of 16. we need to have an even number of blocks in our Row for the pattern to work out I'm not going to pay any attention to what Fabrics I'm sewing to other Fabrics if I happen to sew two Fabrics that are the same together so be it I want it to be really Scrappy so I'm just going to sew and not pay any attention to the fabric choices once you have all your pieces sewn together it's time to cut them apart I like to use my blade saver cutter for this it really helps things go a lot faster you can either cut each piece one at a time and just start stacking them up or I like to use a hand over hand method where I cut one and then I bring my hand over the top and cut the other one and just kind of go back and forth and back and forth wow that's a lot of blocks now it's time to take these sets of two and turn them into sets of four if you wanted to after you start sewing things together you could press in between adding each new set so after the sets of two are done you could press after the sets of four are done you could press I'm going to wait until the end and press my entire row all at once as I'm sewing these pieces together I'm already thinking ahead to what pattern I want to use for next month and what colorway I want to use if you have any suggestions for me make sure to leave it in the comment section and I'll try to work on it foreign [Music] and now it's time to turn them into sets of eight I did pin these together just to make it a little bit easier to handle the stacks were getting a little bit out of control and this kind of helps me keep everything together plus it helps me double check that I had all the pieces I was wanting to work with look now it's time to take these sets of eight blocks and turn them into rows of 16 blocks I had originally only planned to have 20 rows of 16 but then I cut so much extra that I had enough to make 23 rows so I just decided to go for it [Music] I'm going to press all the rows the same I'm going to press the blocks that have the horizontal seams towards the blocks that have the vertical seams if you press all the rows the same way when you sew the rows together the seams will automatically Nest together and there won't be any pinning necessary unless you want a pin you can always pin if you want to when you get done pressing each of your rows will look the same they will be pressed the same way so on one end all these seams will be horizontal or going across the whole width of the strip on the other end it'll go up and down so now you just have to alternate each row so that you can get the pattern to continue on for the whole quilt now it's time to sew the rows together you'll start just the way you did with the blacks by sewing sets of two and then sets of four and sets of eight when you can and so on as I was sewing the blacks together and the black sets together and now the rows together I'm not paying any attention to the Fabrics that I'm sewing together I'm just picking it up and sewing it it's the best way to do Scrappy you don't want to overthink it overthinking it makes it take longer and it usually doesn't turn out any better than if you keep rearranging things to try to get it right if doing Scrappy is hard for you put it in a paper bag and don't look just pull it out at random and just keep on sewing for this quilt I figured I used about 74 strips of fabric or about two jelly rolls that would equal about five or six yards of fabric so it kind of felt good to get this fabric sewn up and used in a special project if you wanted to make a smaller version of this you could make one that was 10 by 14 or 10 by 16 and that would use about one jelly roll or about two and a half yards of fabric if you wanted to make a large version of this you could make one that was 26 by 30 that would be about 104 by 120 and it would use up about 150 strips of fabric that's about 10 and a half yards total when I was giving the Fabrics ready to sew and I was taking them out of my bucket it didn't seem to make the pile in my bucket go down very much but I'll keep working at it and we'll try to get that bucket cleaned out foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] until all the rows were sewn together to press it for the final pressing I pressed all the rows in One Direction when I was done pressing it I quilted it on my long arm quilting machine I used a cross lines pattern that was something really easy and simple it would look good on the quilt I used a green fabric for the backing and the leftover backing I used for The Binding all those leftover little pieces from the beginning when we were cutting I sewed those all together into a very long strip I just kept cutting it in half and sewing it back to itself until I had a big chunk which I quilted and turned into a 16 inch pillow and the last little bit got turned into an eyeglasses case nothing was wasted except for these little tiny pieces I tossed those we sure hope you enjoyed our Scrappy project using two and a half inch strips we hope you'll hit the like button leave us a comment share with your quilting friends and subscribe thanks for watching and happy quilting

Channel: The Quilted Forest

Views: 264,748

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Id: Uh1xr0c0WV8

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023