Simple Steps to Successful Strip Sewing - Making it Fun - Episode #85

i never cheat but i'm often looking for more efficient ways to build parts and pieces of the quilts here in the studio today's video is all about some of my secret steps to successful strip sewing let's get started that's right everybody welcome back to making it fun i am your host rob appel from michael miller fabrics and i'm super excited to see all of you out there now today's video is more of a skill builder video than an actual quilt building video but like i was saying in the introduction there are some really cool tricks for making quilt blocks or quilt units parts and pieces for your project that you can actually start with strips for example this quilt here if you haven't seen my variegated version of the modified three dudes which was actually raymond steve's pattern from the three dudes quilt shop out in arizona i believe it was called the strip surprise i did it years ago and modified it called it the three dudes but long story short i put up this video and i was featuring in that video how to use these really cool variegated or ombre boarded from the quintessential line from michael miller fabrics and it was a great video and i'll have that link at the back end of this video for all of you but today we're talking about secrets and and tips and tricks to making your strip sewing more successful we're going to break down some of those barriers i'm going to teach you that you don't have to go up one direction and back down the other which saves fabric and a bunch of these things but i wanted to use print so that you could also really follow and see that we're doing all of this obviously right sides together but in this video i was using solids and sometimes that can be a little tricky especially for our brand new quilters that are out there and this is why we do these videos to welcome all of you to our community and yeah get you hooked on the habit is really what's going on so let me introduce you to this fabulous new line from michael miller fabrics it started shipping a couple of weeks ago to your local quilt shops your online retailers it's called la vida loca and it is awesome it is one of our hottest sellers which means it'll be easier for you to find in a lot of your quilt shops out there that's one of the questions we get here at making it fun often so i'm just going to quickly flash some of these wonderful fabrics some of the theme fabrics our sugar skulls and a couple different color ways i love this print with the guitars and the frames of the cactus and the donkey on it and i think maybe carmen miranda there how cool is that the llamas the stripe we've got some like tattoo heart coordinate again i love all of this kind of stuff i want to use this really cool cactus print today and if you stick with me and keep watching the videos i'm going to come back and do something else with our big theme fabrics but i wanted to show you this awesome cactus print i want to use this today because the strips we're going to be using aren't going to be real wide so i want kind of a medium to small print to start with this is one of the ones we're going to use okay i want this as a coordinate because i love the way the colors pull together and let me just flash a couple of these last like i said these will be back in other videos very soon for you to all see and enjoy our la vida loca collection but i'm gonna tear apart the set here while i'm go ahead and slide this stuff over and out of our way oh if that could only been intentional you hear the lens cap still rolling around over there genius okay and then i also wanted to use one of our traditional our basics like we normally use it making it fun this is the michael miller marble fabric and the reason i'm using this not only the colors look fabulous together of course but i wanted to show you that a lot of times when you take stuff out of your stash it's been sitting around for a while and maybe it looks like it's got a really great cut to just get started but step number one for secrets to successful strip sewing is to slow down what and and there's a quick follow-up number two step which is we're gonna start by pressing everything straight out of the quilt shop straight out of the stash we want to go ahead and take our fabrics apart we want to come on over here get our iron turned on nice and hot if you're a steam kind of person go ahead if you're a pre-washer well that's a lot of work but it's not a bad idea and you're probably more accustomed to this than i am because i'm not a pre-washer meaning that i don't take my fabrics my yards straight from the local quilt shop and or my stash and throw it in the washer dryer what i do is i bring it home i don't wash it but before i start cutting into it using it most of the time and i really should do this more often i'm going to take the time to press it i'm going to get all of these wrinkles out i'm going to get it nice and flat i'm going to get all the loose threads off of it and one of the things if you haven't heard me say it now i didn't make this up but i did learn it and i do believe it that fabric has memory so you can see some of these heavy creases and whatnot in the marble fabric and right now as i go ahead and just drift my iron over here i'm applying a little bit of steam and a little bit of heat of course it's an iron that's what it does and then i'm going to leave the fabric to rest it's just going to sit here because i want it to go into a nice flat cool state and that way all of the fibers it's kind of like blocking your quilt or if you're doing yarn work weaving work like blocking your weaving basically getting it a little bit hot a little bit damp and then letting it sit till it's cool so that the memory of the weave goes back and stays nice and straight and nice and flat and if you're really sold on this method it's probably better to go ahead and iron the next piece on top of the first piece than it is to move this because that is still warm which means it could go back to that wrinkly not so pretty state now we're talking about pressing we are talking about steps to success so i'm not going to press this actually with that crease in it either this is straight off the bolt straight out of your quilt shop so i'm going to now open it up selvage to selvage and do the same thing now we don't need tons of it so i'm not going to press the whole darn thing today that wouldn't be efficient but i want to make a few strips and so i do want to go ahead and press a couple inches worth and what i'll do is i'll show you again a quick lesson on how to construct strips that will work into this and i'll even take you all the way through the half square triangle at the end but we start with our strip sewing and there's a couple of reasons that getting it nice and organized is really important nice and um what am i trying to say flat smooth successful let's get that last color and like i said step one slow down normally i'd have half the quilt though by now but we're slowing down opening it up salvage the selvage and you can see those creases or wrinkles as they go across there and again we're just going to press gliding that iron maybe you want to give it a little steam that's going to get it hotter it's going to help the wrinkles come out but it will then have to sit here longer because it needs to come back to its cool state so we're going to do that we're just going to let it go back to its cool state [Music] timing this ah long enough okay so now let's make sure our space is clear and ready to go we don't want to have any problems these are the sides i'm working from so now as i come back in here i'm going to come over here and i'm going to fold it i like my selvages to line up so i'm just kind of making sure that edge down there looking nice and crisp that's the other reason i take the fold out because sometimes the fold isn't perfect in the spot you want to be working okay so we're going to set that one over now as i'm grabbing the marble fabric i did like i pointed out i had already been cutting from this and so a lot of us will you know just kind of go oh great well i'm going to take the time and i'm going to go ahead and lay and just line up the last cut that i made and boy that sure looks pretty good and i could probably just lay right into that but now as i look at my selvedge i don't know if you can tell or not but they're running kind of sideways which means that i might get more shift or torque or pull or wobble in my seam so if i really because we're trying to you know if you've made garments you always were talking about keeping the grain line straight with your pattern so with quilting that really can help especially in your early years so now as i actually line up my selvedges down here look at this you can see across there that cut is not okay so what i want to do is i want to go ahead and shave off the least amount of this because i want to make a bunch of little skinny strips of this so now as i do that i'm going to come up here and as i get ready because i have now set that fold i'm looking at the lines on my ruler across the fold then i'm going to start to scoot it back to that corner right there to make it efficient first one okay now step or trick number two secret number two is when you get ready to cut a lot of times you're going to be cutting a really long strip so this has two steps within this secret alone okay first step is don't fold fold fold fold until it's like a little four inch strip and try to cut it with one of these smaller shorter rulers these are great for smaller shorter projects we're not doing that right now we're doing a 45 inch strip of fabric i'm going to make this one and a half inches so that we have a nice one inch reveal showing when we're done and so if i fold it too many times what can happen is you're going to get creases and if you've ever seen it there's like this little hourglass shape that is made where the fold is because the folds will cause the fabric to do different things so right now i have a single fold right up here that's okay but i don't have two three or four folds in this one single layer of fabric so step two a we were on slow down then we moved into accuracy in our cutting one fold if you can two folds if you have to but let's try to stick with one fold second strip is you notice i keep trick is i keep grabbing up here on my ruler how many of you have had this happen as you start to cut in to your fabric the whole ruler starts to shift one way or the other there's a couple of things you can do for yourself one is you might want to put on your heels today okay so if you're taller you're gonna have more downward pressure a further reach you're gonna be able to get closer to the top of your ruler you notice it's the top of the ruler that shifts it's not the bottom because it's the way that we start to put our pressure as we get away from our body okay it's body mechanics that cause that so bring your work in close to you keep it in near your waistline okay i want you to make sure everything is square here that's going to give us a good cut but now with my body mechanics as i go to reach onto this big ruler i want my hand to land up near the top not near the bottom at least in the middle but if i can hold that last third of the ruler i'm not going to cause my ruler to veer now i'm going to come down in here and i'm going to start i'm going to put nice pressure all the way through i'm going to peel that back to check that i got it all off on the first cut and now i've got a really nice really true line that should be 90 degrees off the fold straight up both pieces and our selvedges wind up which means our grain lines should be good i think we're getting somewhere folks now maybe there's a step c to this cutting portion of it i rotated the fabric i'm pretty right-handed i can cut with my left hand but i'm better if i always cut with the rotary cutter in the right hand itself so that's the next thing is let's make sure that we're making good workspace we're making good body mechanics like i said you might need to be taller you might need to stand on a stool or use a shorter table some of these things are very effective now the next thing we wanted to do like i said i want to cut a one and a half inch strip i want to cut a bunch of them so i'm going to come on over here and now the next trick is because i can't use the fold down here i only have one and a half inches it's not trustworthy it's too short but if i use this whole line across here that i first cut that's why it's clean that's where it is now i'm going to come up here put that pressure in that last third of the ruler i put through here and i've actually got a pretty good amount of pressure down here and this is another trick i learned and this is for all cutting not just strips but you'll notice i'm starting to put my finger out the ruler or excuse me the cutter i've been taught that that's going to help with tendonitis over the time i don't know but i sure couldn't certainly cut a lot of fabric and i do feel it at the end of the day sometimes okay did we get a nice cut we did fantastic let's set this aside we're going to need four of those strips so let's just blast those out really quick slowly quickly kind of thing okay so now i have four of these wonderful strips like this one and a half inches wide perfect now what i want to do is i want to go ahead and get myself a few more two and a half inch wide strips okay so as we come over here it's going to be the same exact technique let me fold this over so you can already see that i have not a perfectly square cut so we're going to do the same thing whether it's off the bolt out of your stash i'm already starting backwards you saw it i know i'm thinking about what to say not how to cut we got to square it up first we're going to true it up first and i didn't do it on the purple fabric the marble but i'm going to do it now i like to have the fold at my lap i can actually see it better and so therefore i actually have the fold in my lap selvages are lined up i'm lining up that square edge i'm making sure i'm trimming all the way through both pieces of fabric at the end we've got ourselves one more great cut out of that goes perfect here so for the fun of this we're like i said we're gonna do some two and a half inch strips now checking my ruler watching this line over here oh isn't that interesting something looks like it's gone wrong maybe i wasn't paying attention but what i'm seeing right now and i'm pretty sure you can't see this as i look down the line the fabric's doing this so i either didn't cut it straight or when i landed it didn't land straight so first of all real quick i'm just going to take i move the fabric i'm going to double check two and a half inches pretty sure the line is still straight on my ruler oh that fixed it just like that i thought i had done a good job cutting so when i moved it over i must have warped it so again i'm not forcing the fabric into a straight line but that didn't look right so i'm taking the time to make it nice and flat nice and straight as we get ready to cut four of the two and a half strips of our cacti oh another point i'm so glad you're still here and paying attention i started going too fast and down over here you can't necessarily see it but there's a little bit of a fold so there was a fold down here at the corner what that does if you've never seen it if you've never made a cut and fabric before you it's like serrated right if there's a fold over a fold when you cut it it makes this weird jag and then you go back and you're like oh i don't need a ruler to cut i'll just trim it off nope makes it not straight you don't want to do that we want everything as straight as possible because this straight line here is what makes the straight happen over here at the presser foot right so let's go ahead and just go ahead and cut these down one last one okay awesome and because we can we're going to make one of the wonderful pink this will be our center strip okay and because i want the fold in my lap i want my selvedges lined up you'll notice i'm checking the first two steps we did over and over again i'm going to go ahead and line up this line down here first now look folks i've over pushed the ruler so i want to slide it back right i want to just get this lined up super nice making sure that i'm cutting as little as necessary off but i'm cutting again through both pieces of fabric there's nothing more um frustrating than thinking you've cut both pieces and one piece wasn't quite cut and so what's going to happen is that strip's going to be more narrow technically and as you sew your strips on you're doing such a good job sewing it but when you're done there's this weird section that doesn't mathematically line up with everything else and you did such a good job and you blame yourself and you're thinking about i'm going to take i'm giving up sewing i'm going to take up i don't know archery or something and and so at the end of the day it's not always our fault sometimes it can be bad instructors okay here we go last one another two and a half please we're going to put this one right down the center it'll be fun oh heck let's make it unique let's make it two not that it really will show that much but let's make this one a two inch cut i'm obviously designing this as we go it's going to be similar to this one but different because if you saw this one that one was different than the one before it that was similar so you'll want to watch both of those videos of course okay i'm goofing off and this was a sewing video and now we're getting into talking so much okay layout for this we're gonna do our two inch strip we're going to border it with two of our two and a half inch strips and then what i want you to do is do a one inch excuse me these were one and a half one and a half here we're going to finish this out with that that and then one more out there one more out there and that is going to be our strip set row when it is all done cool thing is you're going to have a bunch of chances to practice my sewing techniques now i started to say it earlier at the beginning of the video we are not going to be practicing going up one direction and down the other the next thing i want you to start to learn how to do with me here today is i want you to learn how to sew all your strips from the same side so that that way when we're done especially if you're using a lot of different fabrics of course you know i'm here i'm an employee of michael miller fabrics i love the fabric it was some of the first fabrics i used as i was starting my quilting career and i've been so blessed to grow all the way into a team member at michael miller so yes i use all michael miller so my goods are more standardized but your quilter's out there which means you have michael miller and you have other brands of fabric in your stash right which means they're not always the same length and that can cause some frustrations if you're working on patterns that require that you have very little waste so with this pattern here we're going to dive in now uh to the sewing process and there's a couple of things we're going to do before we go any further into the fabric let's talk about the machine okay so as i come over here to the machine standard sewing machines are set with a two and a half millimeter stitch length it used to be 12 stitches to the inch when we were doing it all in standard measure now we're in metric okay so on this particular machine what i want to do is i want to take mine from a 2.4 down to a 2.0 stitch length so the shorter the stitch the less the feed dogs are moving with every stitch i learned the sewing triangles together for the bias when you don't want wiggle in your bias or stretch in your bias but the same thing works fabulously for your strip sewing right is we don't want to be over pulling our fabric we don't want to be stitching too fast we don't want to be pulling on our fabric we don't want to be water skiing behind the sewing machine we want to let these little feed dogs do their job and pull the fabric through evenly under the needle at the right pace if you haven't cleaned out your feed dogs stop what you're doing right now and clean out your feed dogs on your sewing machine that's going to help everything travel better remember this is all about secrets to successful strip sewing and that's going to really help there okay as we look at our strips one of the things is we often have the habit of as we grab our two fabrics and i'm going to line them up salvage the selvage right sides together as i go to the machine my natural tendency is to sew just like this and now i'm looking at piece number one upside down on top of piece number two if i keep doing this it's not going to work so that the fabric feeds its cup the body of the project comes out of the machine it's all going to start to wad up over here on this side of the machine which we don't want if we're doing other larger more pieces more strips so my rule is as i'm looking at my strips whenever i get ready to go to the sewing machine i'm always looking at the next piece that's just what i hear in my head is are you looking at the next piece or the add-on piece and that gets a lot easier as we get over to pieces five six seven right because you have the body on the machine and now you're just adding pieces it's really tricky and it took me 12 years to figure out what was really happening what i want you to hear what i want you to do is like i said looking at the next piece so if you're starting with pieces one and two here's a quick quiz for you what is the next piece you're right it's piece two it's not piece one so as i get ready to sew these together again let me just put selvages to selvage right right sides together but as i go into the machine i want to be looking at piece two that's gonna be hard for me to see so now i'm gonna come here and i'm gonna rotate it all the way around one more time selvedge to selvedge it's lined up and now we approach the sewing machine you saw the last step which was we were using a two millimeter stitch length instead of a 2.4 2.5 and now as i'm sewing through here can you see the little purple threads hanging out underneath the white fabric i'm hoping you can because i dim using an edge guide which means that my stitch width should be consistent my fabrics are pushed up against there i've got a really nice medium pace you can see i'm not pulling i'm not doing anything every now and again i am standing on the strip but that's because i'm trying to impress all of you while standing and sewing and i've got cameras and lights everywhere and stuff normally you're seated you're sewing you're just drinking wine and listening to rock and roll and making quilts right so at any rate we are or coffee if you're like me uh and we're just gonna take this nice and slow nice and easy point is i'm looking at both colors of fabric i know they're both right there that's going to keep an efficient seam allowance very nicely using my left hand over here well i was to make sure the fabric stays lined up i'm using my right hand down here just to make sure that there's no resistance on the fabric i'm keeping it just slightly off the table so it feeds through nicely until it gets so small that it really won't make any matter and here we're just going to go ahead and stitch all the way through here now as i come out of the sewing machine though i want to be pressing um in to that next strip as well so again the purple is piece two and the um excuse me the purple is piece one the green is piece two so i'm gonna go ahead and press now up into that as well i'll let the iron get cool looks like we'll be taking another nap i gotta let that get hot too i think i you think i'd all right hot enough let's just get this done now so i'm starting to say we're gonna press from piece one into piece two so that we can continually piece press into our new pieces as well as we go one of the tricks i learned a million years ago is i'm just kind of lightly holding up the top piece of fabric as i'm gliding the iron across there and that kind of sets the seam and now i'm just going to go ahead and gently push over and that in my best opinion really helps get the fabric up taut against the thread as much as possible the thread that was used to put that seam together so i'm not distorting it i'm not tweaking it i'm not pulling and i'm pushing on it i did a really cool video recently that was kind of the basics of the nine patch and we did some strip sewing in that that's what got me motivated to do this video for all of you because there was a lot of really cool feedback and comments on that video about different ways for strip sewing i even noticed one of the comments and i think it's a really cool idea person had noticed drawing lines on their on their ironing surface so they could iron and if they had to kind of block their strips for real accuracy i thought that could be a really a neat idea especially if you have a nice big board like that so i thought i would point that out that yes i do read the comments i do appreciate all of you out there entering in your feedback and your opinions and your ideas it's how we all learn together the sewing community is so great yeah you've busted me i was letting it cool down so that it would stay straight you know it it's part of the part that was the first step how could i not teach and then not do it okay moving on we're going to now sew on remember this looks like this in the project i'm handling it like this now because this is where i'm going to feed it into the top of the machine and this is that seam this is our starting point and again i'll show you why that's so important but i got to get all these seams sewn together first so now that we're doing that let's go ahead and take our other strip and now look at this this is piece two remember one two piece three goes on top line up the selvage down here so that as we build and build we have one really easy trim line up top and the rest is gravy so now at this point there's nothing new to learn in the strip sewing we're just going to go ahead same exact thing we're going to do some nice edge guide work i'm looking at both pieces of fabric now i can see just the slightest color like a threads worth poking out underneath again a nice slow a nice even pace and i'm going to sew all the way through this strip set from that end to this end so not up and back not up and back like grandmother taught us okay last reminder is i'm not pushing the fabric into the machine i'm not pulling the fabric back from the machine i'm letting my left hand steer i'm letting my right hand remove the friction or drag on the way to the fabric and that will become more and more important as the fabric gets heavier and heavier and then the last thing the new thing i'll point out before i disappear and come back with all of this stitched together is i always like to try to keep it the heaviest weight of the fabric on the feed dogs themselves and i mentioned to have them clean earlier the feed dogs move the fabric and so yes in the first strip i had the skinny strip on the feed dogs the wide strip up but they were equal kind of now i have more strips down than up and this will just keep building and building out of the machine like this let's cut that thread bring it back to the ironing board and i'm just going to do this process over and over until all of those strips are connected bring it back in lay it nice and flat hold that fabric right up in the air the first one gently lifting setting the threads setting the fabric up against the thread now we're going to push it over and i think you can see how nice and parallel those seams are looking which is our first kind of check to make sure we're doing it right so let me go ahead and continually sew on these pieces and like i said i'll be right back in just a few moments with everything stitched together and i'll show you how we can have some fun create that up as a little bit of a bonus and you will then can take off in your own sewing room and practice your secrets to successful strip sewing i got to think that through every time i say last strip just went on looks pretty dang good if you ask me let's go ahead and press this out same way we've been doing the whole time pressing up into that next strip or the last strip the strip you were just handling and now i'll walk you through the trick to making these really cool looking blocks focus your eye on the purple right now that's what becomes the black in this quilt behind you of course i did the center with a single strip the original had three strips in the middle and there was a little bit of a math challenge which actually started getting me very concerned about how people strip so so years ago is what kind of started the seed that grew into today's video so this particular thing we're going to want to make squares out of it now so we can play with this project and normally if you're following this project you would actually make two identical strip set rows so you can make six total squares originally the math was so wide this way you didn't quite have enough this way especially if you piece going one direction and down the other because this side right now clean easy to cut this side over here not as much a little bit more of a stair step and you can even see look kids that one right there i was starting to feel a little rushed so i punched it i hit the gas on two strips over here on the machine when you weren't looking and i started to stretch the fabric a little bit and it made it a little bit longer not terrible but it still certainly does do what i said it would do so at any rate strip sets here next step we're going to do is we're going to clean this edge off we want to do that by taking our ruler and what i'm going to do is i'm going to look at that line i'm looking at that line i'm looking at that line i'm looking at this line everywhere across here and then i'm going to cut so that i have no selvage no white no nada in my first block okay so first slice right through here and i've got a really nice crisp cut we need to now know how tall this is and we all seem to have a different quarter inch size so that means that your size and my size might be different so you're going to need to measure if you're following the info to make that particular pattern i measuring up here and i am landing literally let me put my head in there in the way and get everything there 13 and a half and that's great because if you get over 14 14 and 14 is 28 you add another 14 on that and i think we're at like 42 and that's where that can be a little dicey so i'm going to measure this i'm double checking measure twice cut once like we always do here making it fun 13 and a half and now what i want to do is i want to rotate this down a couple of ways i could use the lines on the um table i have a big square over here that's 13 and a half and that's really what we should do so let me take a moment because if we're talking about secrets to successful sewing the right tool for the job is one of those right now um probably should check to make sure both rulers are the exact same marks but i'm not saying that out loud okay 13 and a half over here and watching the lines making sure everything is still nice and crisp nothing shifted around in there and i'm going to go ahead and cut one of these at 13 and a half i'm gonna go ahead and move some of this stuff out of the way i'm feeling very disorganized today does it look that way yes that's your question for the comments below does it look as disorganized as i feel today so what happens when you make up the video while you're filming it 13 and a half over here 13 and a half over there all my lines are lining up nice and if you ever needed to kind of cheat because what am i looking at here that makes me want to do that i've got a line that goes here a line that looks good in here and then things started to get kind of sloppy so i want to just stop drop the ruler back down at the 13 and a half mark let's really look at that and i can just pull this bottom if i have to a little with so many different seams and so much different grain things start to flex around okay so 13 and a half again i've cut my second and just so that you would know here you can see we have plenty for the third and if these had gotten wider or if i hadn't shortened that strip a little bit it can be a little dicey so just a quick little reminder originally i'd use two and a half inch strips in the original pattern i went down to two today to that just to make sure we had plenty that's the other side but for this step and then we're out for the day i just need to show you how to make these awesome half square triangles with those stripes running through them i know you can't even see them yet can you okay so i need you to take one of your squares as it stands like this with these stripes running i'm going to call it horizontal right sides up i'm going to take this particular square right now with the stripes running vertical up and down right sides together i'm going to drop them on top of each other and we are going to now sew these together all four sides so i'm going to come over here this is going to be the easiest side to start on because my seams are heading downhill and the piece underneath is a solid strip so i'm going to stitch on a quarter inch seam watching those edges making sure everything's coming together real nice looking for that other color sticking out the edge just slightly and now what i'm going to do just like it's monday night softball as we get near this corner i'm going to ask you just to run through it like it's first base you got your base hit and drop your needle and stop okay now i'm going to pivot so i'm not trying to pivot at the quarter i'm going to go all the way off and all the way back on at the quarter inch so yes we just sewed that corner completely closed now on this side your seams are on the underside and they're facing that away so it could be a little tricky so if you feel it getting caught on anything you can kind of lift up as they go in that'll be the tough side and again another base hit so right through that first base line stop drop your needle pivot make sure that everything's lined up out here on this outside edge again use your finger to push those seams down if you need to or stiletto works even better and you don't risk bleeding all over your project that way and as i come into this last corner here excuse me that third corner another base hit so we have three runners first second and third rotate it out there and now i've got this trick i started doing because i teach this project so much on the last seam i'm actually now kind of giving a little extra pressure down here in this first corner and for whatever reason that just seems to keep everything from going no pucker at the end beautiful and i want you to run right through first base again which brings a runner home this is fantastic and we now have a small problem because i just sewed all four sides closed kidding nope that's part of the project what i want you to do now is we're going to dog-ear our corners so just gently we're gonna take off the threads have crossed i want you to leave the cross but take the rest of the corner out because that's just bulk we don't want there later and now once that is done like that okay i want you to take your ruler make sure you've got a good working space my stuff's going to be in my way i can already tell because i want to lay my ruler right where the threads have crossed so i've got a thread cross here i've got a thread cross there i'm going to cut this through and don't move anything okay flip it over set that ruler again through the crosses of the threads in the opposite diagonal move your body so you're still being safe and efficient remember that trick earlier putting pressure down on the ruler do it again all the way through and i missed the thread but only one okay so look boom there's those blocks just like this that you saw up on the wall pretty cool right we can take a second hit them with the iron so i like to hold these up and press into that straight seam the purple fabric right now okay and now just a quick to show you the way they're going to come together here just bring in all of those pink centers to touch and there you have that block that block again kind of yes it's the same it just looks different because of the fabrics and the choices of the widths and all of that that was variegated but technically this will do it you also have these really cool little pink parts out there so on the other side these will come in and form like a square in a square that one was the seams are heading the wrong but i think you can still see that right in there if i were to press those down that's the other block that you're seeing right there on that awesome quilt super simple super easy and i know a super long video that was supposed to just be quick simple sewing techniques or strategies secrets to strip sewing and i'm so glad you're here today hope you learned something and we'll see you very soon with another video right here at making it fun [Music] wow you are still there thanks for sticking with me till the end of the video i know i get a little long-winded sometimes but if you did enjoy today's video make sure you check out a few of the other ones we've created i think they're terrific and of course please subscribe to the channel make sure you hit the little bell to be notified i don't want you to miss a moment of the fun stay safe and happy sewing

Channel: Making It Fun with Rob Appell

Views: 248,283

Rating: 4.9110203 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Miller Fabrics, Rob Appell, strip sewing, sewing secrests, strip quilts, quilting skills, rotary cutting, straight sewing

Id: vPu3ICco0Ck

Length: 40min 50sec (2450 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021