The Ultimate Scrap Quilt Tutorial

hello everybody I'm Nora burough I was recently at a guild Retreat and my friend Joyce was working on this super cool scrap project and I was totally jealous I wanted to be working on the exact same thing so today that's what we're going to do I have this bag that I had just thrown kind of leftovers from a project a really long time ago I threw it in this bag and then since then I've kind of just been throwing random pieces in there so I can't even totally remember what all is going on there but we're going to take a look and then we're going to make this project from those scraps I think it's going to be awesome let's let's do it I think what I'm going to do um I want to uh make anything that's not a square or rectangle make it a square or rectangle so I'm going to iron some of these pieces make sure they're squares and rectangles and then I need to cut any of the bigger pieces like this one I need to make sure that it's no more than 4 and 1/2 in wide and then it could be as long as I want but at least 4 and a half inches uh I'm going to kind of get organized here and iron some stuff trim some stuff and see see what's next I have a bunch of pieces ironed and trimmed here all into the 90° angles the magic number I'm looking for is 4 and 1/2 in I'll start with these smaller pieces here uh maybe some medium Pieces Just pairing up um anything with a lot of contrast is is the goal as I put two pieces together so for example I have this piece that I put together I'll add on another piece again as a reminder for 4 and 1/2 in is what I'm trying to get to so for example I think I'm going to do this one and then I'll just trim off the ends but I want to continue to make this bigger until I have my 4 and 1/2 in and it can be as long as I want I'm just looking for the 4 and 1/2 in wide so I'll put this piece on next here's an example of one that I've been working on so this is exactly 4 and 1/2 in wide and I have no idea how long it is but what I can start to do is I have this piece it's 4 and 1/2 in and so I can look at attached these pieces together let's see something like like this like that looks kind of cool I could spin it around and have it be like that which I think I like even better now I'm not going to attach these yet I'm kind of just saving up these 4 and 1/2 in strips because I want to have flexibility of moving pieces around but here's at least two that I have done for now here's an example of where I've made this unit to be far larger than 4 and 1/2 in but what I'll do is trim this down and then I can use the extra bits in another section so here I'm cutting four this to be 4 and 1/2 in and now I'll have this piece left over where I can add another piece onto the side to make this a 4 and 1/2 in strip and then let's do it the opposite way as well oh darn so I kind of messed up there because I didn't need to cut this into to a 4 and 1/2 in square I could have left this to be a 4 and 1/2 in strip which was what I initially wanted to do so now I'm kind of annoyed at myself but that's okay I'll add another piece on it'll be fine these will just be two separate pieces but dang I now have a bunch of long strips here as you can see that are all 4 and 1/2 in wide and then just a variety of different lengths I actually have even more than this I have a bunch of um strips that need to be ironed on my ironing board um but here's some of them here now let's talk about what to do with these strips for a second so here's a couple strips here's the one that we were working with initially and what I've what I've noticed is it would be kind of cool just to sew these you know make all of the strips the same length and then just sew them back to back it makes kind of a really beautiful um piece here I think but that's not what we're actually doing so what I need to do is I need to cut these strips into specific lengths so I need four strips that are 20.5 in so let's see if this this one might be close let's see how big this one is this is about 21 in so I would need to just trim it down just a bit uh but so I have one that is 20 at least 20.5 in and I need a total of four then I need eight strips that are 12.5 in and this one may be pretty close to that let's let's take a look this is 17 so I would have to cut that down quite a bit um so instead of cutting that one down I'll probably just expand it to be one of the 20.5 in long pieces so I need eight strips that are 12.5 and then finally I need six pieces that are 4.5 in square so for example something like this or something like this these are both for 4.5 in square so I'm going to take a look at what I have and cut my pieces to be the lengths that I need I have all of my pieces cut four of the 20.5 long eight of the 12.5 long and then 6 4 and 1/2 in squares now I also need to cut solid colored fabric of the exact same amounts and dimensions so thinking about you know the colors that would work you really want some contrast so you could do a white you could do a gray you could do some really vibrant color and orange something like that um but what I've decided to do is black and you could just do solid colored black fabric but what I've done is pieced my black it's really black gray and navy as is the Navy the gray and the black and these are all the same Dimension so again I would have the same number of 12 and 1/2 in long as my pieced ones same with my 4 and 1/2 in squares it's the same number of your solid colored fabric which is six six solid colored fabric 4in squares and six of your pieced really bright colorful squares and again the 20.5 in long you need four of those so I've pieced these as well so let's take a look at how we're going to um put these sections together we are going to be working on two blocks at the same time here this is my first block this is my second one ultimately we'll end up with four blocks we'll have additional pieces going around this So eventually this will be a 20.5 in square block and we will have four of those so to start uh but we're just going to do two at a time and then I'll do the other two off camera cuz the other two are done exactly the same as these two you see here I have my 4 and 1/2 in squares straight across same over here my 4 and 1/2 in squares on the top and the bottom I have 12 and 1/2 in rectangles I'm going to start by putting these right sides together so 1/4 in open up an iron I'll do the same on the other side so 1/4 in open up an iron and I'll do the same for this block attach these two together and these ones together to make this a unit I have my middle sewn on here for these ones so next I'll add the top so 1/4 in open up and press same with the bottom so along 1/4 in and then I'll do the same to this block however for this block what I think I'm going to do is actually replace this piece with a solid black piece because I think when it's in a small enough dose uh it gets lost a little bit it'll be a little bit more popping out at you uh if it's one solid fabric so I'll just um seam rip these put in my black but continue on the same as as this block here I have my two units done here and as a reminder I'm also working on my other two you can see them up there uh so I'm doing all four at the same time but I'm just showing you these two because the other two units are done exactly the same way so now we want to put our next layer around so that's going to look like this we want to put the sides on first I'll sew these right sides together to my Center unit here 1/4 inch along this side open up an iron the same to the other side open up then I'll sew the top unit onto the body of my block and then the bottom strip onto the body I'll do the same exact thing for this piece over here so my sides on first both sides on iron them give a nice good press and then add my top and then add my bottom and I'll do the same to my other two blocks I have my four blocks all finished these are not sewn together yet but there are four completed blocks I will get a better view for you in a second cuz I know right now you can't see the whole thing but just to tell you what the next steps are I'm going to sew these two blocks together right along this seam and then these two blocks so those together right along this seam then I'll have two units one unit and another unit and I'll sew those units together right along this middle seam 1/4 in this is one big unit now I sewed all four blocks together and we'll talk about the zebra print in a minute but in terms of just those four blocks together it's not quite as much contrast as I had expected it to be I'm not loving it as much as I thought that I would and I think that if I had just used a solid black around the whole thing uh instead of kind of piecing these dark gray and navies and blacks together that that that would have been better and I think I could have done that really with any color um that was of high contrast to the other pieces but we're just we're just moving forward and I want to put a border on so I'm thinking this zebra print here could be really cool finding a border print is a challenge because of the fact that um you know you really have to find something that pops against all all of these different colors and then the black pretty much anything is going to pop against that as long as it's not too dark but I think that the fact that there's a significant amount of white in this zebra print uh allows for it to pop I hope against the multicolored blocks I laid out that stripe there I'm still not convinced that that that's going to be enough contrast against the multicolored blocks the two the one here and up there uh let me think I may need to have have a solid color go around the whole thing then maybe the stripe and then the zebra I think I really love the zebra I do want it in there um but I just need to make sure that it's going to work I think I'm going to go with this fuchsia here and then I may get rid of the stripe I may do the fuchsia and then the zebra right after it but I'm not sure let's put the fuchsia on first and then see where we're at and here is the final top I ended up not going with those other options that I talked aled about and instead just did this very thin uh strip of black around the entire thing and then put my zebra print in how am I feeling about this piece I have mixed feelings part of me feels that it's really cool another part feels that it's just it's very random and it's a little bit hard to tell what's going on so I'm not exactly sure how successful uh this quilt is in my mind I think I need to put it away for a little bit and then come back to it and see how I feel at that point I have a pretty cool backing for this piece this is the backing that I'm going to use I think that it fits really well with this quilt and then I'll bind it in Black I will say this is a little bit different than Joyce's uh Joyce's was a different layout and in addition hers were smaller black so she just did um I think if I'm remembering correctly these smaller pieces so instead of having the extra border around the outsides hers hers were just kind of the inner square and then a border inner square and Border um so you know you can do different things with this block idea I think that this could have been more effective possibly if I had done a nine patch I think that the pattern would have read a little bit more than just these four blocks but in all honesty it took me a long time to make these four blocks so it is timec consuming but that that would have been I think I think that would have been better I didn't worry about directional fabric here you can see um you know teacups here are pointing One Direction and other pieces are are all over the place and it gave me one less thing to worry about and I think it's effective just to have no particular direction specifically since it's a square you can kind of have it uh facing any way that you want it does measure 54 in square you could use this same idea and really use any tone so for example you could do blues for this part and you know Reds for this outer part or greens and purples or any kind of two-toned scraps would work here I hope this gave you a little bit of inspiration don't forget to subscribe to this channel I also have an Instagram handle it is mostly quilts by Nora I think is the handle the link is in the description here I post a lot of projects that I don't do videos for so you can kind of see some extra stuff there thank you for joining me and I'll see you next time

Channel: Mostly Quilts

Views: 52,057

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Id: BBI_M4-oRrs

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024