STRING SCRAP COASTERS: Quilt as You Go Tutorial: Fast Scrap Project Perfect For Gifts

hi everyone its Megan and I'm here with another video tutorial for a simple scrappy pattern today we're gonna make a set of co-stars from your strings grabs and they're super quick and easy they make awesome gifts and you can make them kind of in a rainbow of colors it's kind of in an afternoon so it's an awesome little project to get you started if you've never done coulis as you go or you have a need for a last-minute gift so let's get started we're ready to make our coasters this is all that you'll need to make a complete set of six coasters you'll need scraps of batting now I've cut mine into seven inch squares I do that when I'm done with a quilting project I take that little kind of the side pieces of batting and anything that's smaller than like a 20 inch square for a pillow front or a long rectangle for a table runner and I cut it into seven inch squares so I'm ready to go to make a set of coasters whenever I want you'll need fabric scraps these are all of my pink string scraps now you can obviously mix and match colors or do it very scrappy but you'll just need to make sure your scraps are a little bit longer than your batting piece you'll need fabric for the back of your coasters I'm using a fat quarter here with these little flower print since I'm doing kind of a Valentine's Day inspired coaster set cutting this fabric will be our first step because you can get six seven inch squares out of it and also an extra little strip to add to your scrap pile you'll need a rotary cutter and a ruler you'll also need a good pair of scissors because we will be trimming these strips down right at our sewing machine and you'll need matching thread because some of the lines of our bobbin thread as well as our top third will be visible in the finish coaster so that's all we need I'm going to press this back quarter and show you how to cut it up into sonar squares I have my fat quarter pressed and ready to cut and to use this shorter ruler all I've done is just fold my fat quarter in half and these are the 18-inch sides this is the 21 inch edge I line it up on one line of my my cutting mat and make sure that the edges are over one line and I'll use that line to give myself a nice clean cut and now we can count over seven and make another cut now I make my coaster seven inches square I cut my fabric and batting seven inches square the actual coaster ends up being about six and a half inches square and I like a nice big coaster I like my mug and my little pennant morning snack all all in one place so if you would prefer a smaller coaster you can certainly adjust these to whatever size you like so so these are our two seven inch by width of fat quarter slices and we're left with this little piece left over now I'm just going to cut this down so that it's a little bit easier to use in our scrappy coaster tops and I'll add these two strips to our pile of scripts now for these pieces we are going to get three seven inch squares out of each one so I'm going to open them up and align them this way so I just line it up on a lime just as I did before making sure that both edges are over any lying on your mat and make a squaring up cut I always double check I always count over because I've made that mistake a couple of times where I use the numbers and then I was off one so I just double-check and count and that has saved me from wasting a lot of fabric so now we have our six seven inch squares for the back of our coaster along with a couple of extra little bonus strings to add to our collection so now it's time to move over to the sewing machine and make our coasters we're ready to make our coasters I have my backing squares my batting squares my strips and my scissors all close at hand but I'm gonna set these aside for a minute the backing squares because we won't need those into the last step of the coaster assembly so what I need first is a batting square and some scrappy strips now if you haven't ever done quilt as you go or improv piecing it's a very kind of loose and non stressful like this should be fun project right so quilt as you go is just like piecing except we're also gonna be sewing through the batting layer at the same time so you take your first strip and align it with the edge of the square overlapping it just a bit because later we're gonna trim this down and we don't want to need batting to overhang our our coaster top so we have the one piece ready to go we're gonna grab another scrappy strip and these are all different widths and it doesn't matter it'll be they'll all blend together in the end so we just trim that down to size and then we align the edges of the two strips and we still want to make sure that the batting is being overhung by the fabric strips a little bit and now we're going to sew a quarter of an inch away from the edge of the fabric strips now I have changed out my thread to my matching red thread in the top and the bottom and I'm using about a two and a half inch stitch length and you want to sew from off the batting to off the batting and then we're just going to open this up and kind of finger press that crease now I like to take the extra step of just doing a little tack down stitch kind of right at the edge of this new strip to hold it in place while we add the next strip to it so I just stitched for about an inch inch and a half right at the edge of this fabric about an eighth of an inch in and that just helps keep this strip from kind of flopping back over as we get our next strip ready to go so now we just repeat this process all the way across we grab a strip line it up and trim off any excess with our scissors and now we're ready to sew another quarter of an inch seam okay it's ready for we're ready for our last strip and we want to make sure that we choose one that's wide enough right here to hang over the edge of our square of batting so like if we chose this one and then took a quarter of an inch away in the seam allowance we'd end up with a really skinny strip left over so this last strip you just kind of want to think about make sure it's wide enough to really um cover cover your batting I'm gonna use this really nice wide one now it's kind of hard to tell where the batting is you're a little tack down stitch so for this last one I just flip it over and I tack right along the edge of the batting just like that and now that we've done all of our piecing on the top it's time to add a little bit of detail stitching on the top of our coaster now this is a great place to use all those little decorative stitches on your stitching machine I'm piecing on a droopy today which only does a straight stitch so I'm just gonna do a little echo of each seam on either side of each of these seams [Applause] we have our coaster top that has been trimmed back down to seven inches and I just use the outline of the batting to do that trimmed off all the excess and now we are ready to add the back of our coaster and we're going to do that by placing it right sides together with our top and we are going to stitch a quarter of an inch away from the edge leading about it to in a two to three inch gap along one side and I have found it easiest to leave that gap along this edge that has the strip rather than this edge that has all the seams on it just makes it a little bit easier to press and top stitched a later step so I'm going to start right here go all the way around and back stitch at start and stop [Applause] we're ready to do the last few steps of our coaster but first we need to trim the corners of our squares now this is going to be turned right side out so there will be a lot of fabric here right on this inside corner if we don't trim it so this will just help your coaster lay nice and flat and not have like a big bulbous corner so I'm just trimming at like a 45-degree angle right outside this line of stitching here you don't want to clip the stitching although if you do just like here I'll show you if you do clip your stitching whoops all you're gonna do is run another line of stitching parallel to the cut that you just made as close to the edge as you can get and just back stitch a couple times and that'll help keep that corner from coming undone so now it's time to turn it right-side out and you just want to make sure that you start with the you want to get your fingers between the two right sides of fabric you don't want to try to go between the batting and the fabric or you'll have a lot of trouble since that stitch down so make sure your between the top and the backing and just take your time and wiggle it all through you can use your fingers to kind of poke out the corners and the edges and then I take a old knitting needle I have just to poke out the corners and you just want to very gently nudge that into the corner and wiggle it around a little bit to get your corners nice and poked out in square and I kind of run it along the seam to the next corner and do the same you'd want to take your time and go kind of gently because there's not a lot of fabric here beyond your stitches so it'd be really easy to poke right through your stitches so just take your time nudge it all out if you don't have a knitting needle you can use a bodkin like this you could use a little broad can or you could use one of those purple things those are really handy to have around you just don't want anything with a sharp point like don't use your scissors now it's all nice and flat and we're just gonna quickly press this so that it's nice and square and the seams are completely out okay we're at our pressing service and our iron it's nice and hot I'm just gonna take a moment and kind of fold in the quarter inch seam allowance from this opening and put a little clip right there just to hold it in place while we start to iron so I'm just going to roll the seam allowances in my fingers to get them nice and flat and then I'm going to take my iron and press so I'm just using my iron to press and I'm gonna remove that clip and make sure I press that opening and that's it one final step we are going to top stitch along the outside of the coaster and you want to do this about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the coaster so you're sure to catch the seam allowance from the opening if we did a quarter of an inch seam allowance because there's only a quarter of an inch of fabric turned in you might not catch it and this opening my pop open so 1/8 of an inch all the way around alright we're ready for the top stitching and you can start anywhere just let's start right here now you might want to change your stitch length to around a three it'll make it a little bit easier to stitch over some of these bulky seams just take your time around the corners I find it's easy to get pretty close to the corner and then kind of move this to a 45-degree angle and then kind of complete the curve around the corner to the next side now if your machine does have a little bit of trouble getting through some of these areas using a stiletto can really help you can kind of push the seam allowance down and help feed your fabric through your foot also this is pretty thick so if you need to adjust the tension on your sewing machine foot decreasing that tension will kind of raise this up and put a little bit less pressure on your work and make it go through a little more smoothly I just take a few little back stitches there at the edge to lock this together and then we just have a few little threads to clip and there's our finished coaster isn't it adorable perfect I'm ready to make the rest so that's it that's our little scrappy coaster I made all of these in about an hour and a half I will say that they although they are made with scraps they're not like an amazing scrap Buster project because I'm looking over at my pile of pink string scraps and it looks pretty much the same as it did but they're super fast and you could also apply this to a larger project like a table runner or maybe some placemats and that would eat up your scraps a little bit faster than coasters so if you liked this tutorial and you'd like to see more I have a new video every Monday morning so be sure to hit subscribe and I will see you then happy quilting you

Channel: Tiny Orchard Quilts

Views: 46,096

Rating: 4.9406781 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilt tutorials, quiltmaking tutorials, scrap quilting, quilt scraps, quilt as you go, small quilt project, fast sewing project, quilt gift, sewing gift, easy quilt project, beginner quilting, beginner quilt, fabric scraps, free motion quilting, longarm quilting, machine quilting, quilting tutorial, scrap quilt, quilt as you go for beginners, fabric scraps ideas, fabric scraps projects, string quilts free patterns, sewing gifts, scrap quilting ideas

Id: D-KJ8H5nxRA

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020