String Piecing with Lori Baker

quilters newsletter TV the quilters community is brought to you by Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years hi and welcome to quilters newsletter TV the quilters community I'm Mary Kate car petrus and I'm back again with Laurie Baker Laurie welcome thank you you're here today to talk to us about string piecing correct that's correct and I really like to do strength pieced quilts they're kind of our rules and you use up a whole bunch of scraps and I think that's one of the things that as quilters we we always are trying to figure out how to use up the leftovers yes and this is a great way to use leftovers and everybody loves my string piece quilts you know so let's just keep playing around with them and see what we can do now I know you were talking about this quilt that you were working on and then when you brought it in you had it hanging up in your office I think it was just yesterday the day before it's just every time I walk past your office it just caught my eye because it's beautiful you chose sort of a unified color palette just a couple of colors you could say your purple and green I guess but so scrappy and interesting and it all hangs together it does let's talk about how you got this look okay so the first thing that I did I'm making this quilt for my niece and the the request was cool colors so I just went in my scrap pile and pulled out all the blues and greens and purples and had this huge scrap pile in the middle of my floor I pieced on paper foundations mhm and typically I use an eight-and-a-half by 11 piece of paper and then square it so I've gotten a eight and a half by eight and a half inch square mm-hm and the reason I do that is I recycle use paper it's a great way smart right why not and I just start throwing things together and there aren't any rules and you can use whatever you want I use if you look at the quilt it's got everything from real formal floral prints to kids prints there's even one 30s reproduction printing in here and I'm not sure how that got in there because I wouldn't have ordinarily put it in but it's not objectionable because the quilt is so scratched right and it all the scrappier it gets the more it hangs together that's right away not I did like the look of one particular fabric in the center of every block so I chose the Aqua it may look white on camera but it's it's an aqua plane strip down the middle a list aqua possible and it did it does sort of read white but then when you see it against the paper foundation then I call it right but what it does it just gives that nice softness it don't lens in it does and it gives you lots of design possibilities yes you've got that one thing on every single block and it gives your eye a place to rest as we like to say in the biz it gives it gives that just a calmness in the middle the scrappiness right great so let's talk about how I do the blocks okay should I move this out of the way right as I said yes it is okay so I use paper foundations for this particular one and most of the time I use eight and a half inch squares of paper and like I said some of them are our recycled made bergna I use ninety needle because I want a little bit bigger hole okay so the paper is easier to remove at the end to shorten your stitch length I shorten my stitch length and I feel like thread color doesn't matter because it's very scrappy chances are the threads gonna match something or the other at some point down the line it's also where I use up the ends of bobbins okay so fifty weight works for going through the paper and the yes yes and in fact I'm not even all that particular about that you know if there's some 40 weight that I need to use up okay that'll work okay so we're not precious we're no no the critical thing is you want that needle size to be a little bit bigger and you want to shorten your stitch lengths because it makes the paper easier to remove great okay so what's next so now I want to show the strip's I cut my strips anyplace from an inch and a half to two and a half inches and I do not measure if I think it's two and a half okay that'll be good mm-hmm if I have to measure it's close enough if I have to if I'm not sure mhm see what I'm saying this one's too white I can tell it's wider than what you want to be it's lighter than I want to use so then I'm going to cut that either in half or maybe an inch and 1/4 and an inch and 3/4 something mm-hmm and a cannon it doesn't really matter just it's more interesting if the strips are a little narrower and then this one this this strip is you said it's a you cut it on the bias yes this is actually leftover binding from a quilt and because it had this this pretty pretty checkered plaid thing I cut it on the bias because that shows off better on the bind yeah and I don't care that this is bias again as well ditching to the foundation I'm stitching onto a foundation so it'll work great so now let's show them a couple of the stitched foundations so here's what happens first I just run that diagonally across the foundation hmm and right sides together line up the edges and stitch from one end to the other I like to go diagonally because we use up more strips more sizes of strips that way yeah and as we'll see later it really opens up your design exactly these as well and then do you press after each one or you just finger pressing or I finger press at this point but when I get ready to to add the next layer I'm gonna actually use the iron okay just because I think it it makes things lay flatter and and then I don't have any bunching going on so it's just easier that way I do a fun thing when I actually stitch and that is I want to line up this fabric so I'm a quarter of an inch past the edge of the paper and then I'm going to go ahead and put it under the machine and I'm going to stitch so you've got a really long tail there I do have a really limited that's intentional exactly exactly I'll deal with that in a minute and and it's so funny because I'm trying to use up scraps but in order to use my scraps most efficiently I don't want to cut it off too long okay happy medium there exactly so I'm just using a quarter inch seam okay same as I don't ordinarily use and when I get a couple three inches from the end so I can see where the paper and the fabric meet now I'm going to cut off my strip and I'm going to cut it a quarter to a half an inch from the edge of the paper okay okay and then I've saved this yes because I might be just what I need for the next line we'll put it aside for you then because you just never know and then again I'm just going to finger press that mm-hmm and I'm going to go ahead and sew another strip on this side and then I'll take it to the iron you build it out tie back like one side than the other one side then the other exact okay so here's one that we've got all the way done and I did want to say something here about the fabric I I had one of those epiphany kinds of things when I'm making a string quilt if I have an ugly fabric I cut it narrower strips but as I was making this I thought what I call ugly may not be what my niece calls ugly so I just went ahead and left the fabric whatever so it's up to us to guess which one you think of it ugly in here then I guess I can guess which one you're talking about and and it doesn't matter because again you get all those scraps together and they don't stick out no I cut from the back when I when I square my block just because it's easier to see that way ups now here we go easier to see the paper edges and I'm just going to line this up cut two sides that's why I like to use the square ruler hmm and then flip it around and cut the other two sides and that is ready to go on the design wall because of the all the design possibilities I do like to use my design long way look at it now that it's so nice and neat see it really it really takes on its shape it does yeah it does and it's fun to watch what happens as far as design possibilities when you get all these things together these straight piece blocks work together kind of like log cabin blocks because there are so many possibilities I frequently start with that medallion look for the center mm-hmm but then you can continue and you can make more of those diamond shapes like I did on the one we showed at the beginning no or you can make it so that we've got concentric circles or squares or whatever you want to call them going around the middle so right yes that's right okay all right interesting that one is what's wrong got it there we go so we've got our light aqua just making more and more yeah we'll call them rings even though they're square shapes right or you can make zigzags okay right yep you're doing fine it shouldn't be this hard sometimes but you know but but that's alright and like I said that's why we have design one yeah you can also make everything go to the same direction so you've just got this diagonal line going across the whole quilt and everything winds up looking different uh-huh and this is your time to play around so if you have a lot of this purple fabric you might not want it all in one corner of the quilt geez kind of spread things around just a fun thing to do it looks great another thing that I do like to play with when I'm doing string piecing is I like to make blocks out of string pieced units making your own fabric in a way yes so when I do that just because it's easy I like to go with 10 inch squares because there are so many patterns for pre-cut 10 inch squares right so I use a tearaway foundation that I cut in 10 inch squares do the piecing the same way as I usually do although sometimes I'm I throw in a little bit more piecing this was a strip that was already pieced that I used across the center and as long as you keep a fairly consistent lines going across other than these little guys going up and down you'll still have the design possibility on it if you put in a whole bunch of the piecing with lines going both waist and it messes up the way it reads when it becomes more of a crazy block exact not a string block yep so not that one is better than the other it's just different and depends on the look you're going for that got it so this 10 inch square I could just use this attendance ware or I could cut it up in other pieces and that's what I like to do so I've cut the 10 inch square into 5 inch squares again a very popular pre-cut size exactly and then I made an eye patch block you to shorten nine-patch so there's a nine patch block with five inch squares and you again you took advantage of the direction idea directionality of the of your piece exactly string and you'd get a different look if you ran those all in the same direction again play on the design yeah another thing I did was I cut my piece in diagonal quarters so then I could make our glass ball mm-hmm just lots and lots of possibility and then again you can play with the direction right because with a quarter square block you're gonna get two going in one direction and two going in the you liked opposite direction exactly design wall is your friend and this is yes it is yes it is and I I just like I said I love the string peace blocks because they use up so much many of our scrap and you have a lot of scraps I do I really do well all of these are great ideas and I'm sure your niece is gonna love the quilt love it it's beautiful didn't you say that she was willing to redecorate around whatever quilt you might use yes yes I asked for color suggestions and they said Oh she'll redecorate the bedroom do whatever you want well this is a quote she's been waiting for and it's well worth the wait I think so I think she'll love it well thanks again thank you for joining us we look forward to seeing you next time take care bye bye quilters newsletter t v-- the quilters community is brought to you by Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years

Channel: Quilting Daily

Views: 38,302

Rating: 4.9093199 out of 5

Keywords: String Quilts, string piecing, paper foundation piecing, foundation piecing, paper piecing, Lori Baker, Mary Kate Karr-Petras, Quilters Newsletter TV, QN TV, Quilters Newsletter Community, Quilters Newsletter TV: The Quilters' Community

Id: aB4t6ZUjuIk

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2015