Using your string quilt blocks in a quilt

hey guys it's Robin are silent crafts welcome to my craft room now that we've made a bunch of our string blocks now we can start putting them together into a quilt we've sewn all our strips down onto our foundation whether it's fabric or some form of paper for those of us that use paper we've removed it and as you can see mine still has a few little pieces in there I am NOT going to be worried about that that's gonna come out in the wash it'll disintegrate eventually or it'll just stay part of my quilts I've seen it about the different things that we can do with these now there are loads of things so if you head over to Pinterest and just search string blocks string block quilts string block projects you know any form of string block Pinterest is really good if you just search for string quilt blocks they're gonna show you all the tutorials they're gonna show you the quilts and there's always search more like this or find more like this and you can spend hours and hours and maybe a few more hours just wandering around Pinterest looking at all the different things I try to stay away from there unless I'm looking for something specific or I know I have 15 or 20 minutes to kill and I didn't bring any knitting projects with me sometimes it's fun to just wander around Pinterest but I have to be careful because if I only have a small chunk of time I can blow that whole amount of crafting time wandering around Pinterest and finding all kinds of new projects that I want to make but this isn't a Pinterest show so let's get to the sewing part I was thinking that I want to make a baby quilt with my string blocks now I can make one baby quilt for each type of project I want to show you today or I can just go ahead and make like a sampler so I thought well let me go ahead and put together a string block sampler quilt and see after it's put together if it's kind of scary-looking that I make something ugly or if it's gonna turn into something fun I also need to add an extra row on to this baby quilt that I've shown you in previous talk to me Tuesday episodes that's kind of what got this whole thing going so we can all see how these blocks go together so revue wanted to learn how to make these half square triangle blocks now I am going to show you that today and I'm going to put them I'll make it out of this fabric and I'll put it onto this quilt but I'm also gonna make a separate quilt today with a couple different variations now I haven't completely put the quilt together yet because I want to show you some of the stuff but some of the things were so simple you do not need me to show you how to sew them together so I'm having a I'm having six sections because I'm making it about 36 by 36 and that these are six and a half inch blocks this way you can see how different ways they go together not all of us have like eq8 or some type of software where we can plug in our blocks that we've made and move them all around to see what they're gonna look like before we make a quilt now of course these are gonna be different because we all have different scraps but you kind of get an idea and if you'll see one of these layouts that you like then you can go ahead and keep making your blocks and going towards that you can do this with any size blocks you have I tend to just I like six and a half inch blocks they're not it's a nice size for me that's what I tend to go with I didn't need the long long strips when I was stitching on my fabric onto my foundations and even when I'm making regular quilts I either do a six and a half or a twelve and a half so they kind of work together for me you of course make any size you want I did my first row I just went ahead and I just stitched them all together so there's no sashings nothing to separate in between I didn't do anything in this one except when I kept them all going at the same way so I have my small part in the upper right corner and the bottom left of course you can switch it any way you want this will be one of my rows in my string block quilt sampler simple simple you can put them all together like this they will all you'll have if you like the same fabrics all the way that you have a whole section of blues you can make them in rows or columns or if you just go totally scrappy you'll just have a whole bunch of a wild and crazy scrappy quilt together then I decided to do a row where I alternate them now they're not all going in the same direction they're not all the same like this one here's our first example and then I went ahead and I did this and see how these were all going the same way and these I went and Zig zagged I also went and used the ones that had the black centers to them so that my row would go ahead and have this fun little accent strip going through the center now of course you would have to plan that ahead of time if you wanted to do a whole quilt like this and as I showed previously you can have you can have them going like this so that you would have a diamond or you can have them going like this so that you would have an X so you could put your accent strips in any direction you like so now that's what you can do with them if you only use your string blocks and you use nothing else you could alternate them like this if you wanted to I think you'd probably be better off if you either left them all going in the same direction or alternated them because at this point it just you're already got a lot going on with all the variety of scraps you're using that it might be better to go ahead and make sure that if you're doing it this way to do it one way or the other now if you got tired of making strings and you only made enough to do maybe half a quilt and you gave up because it really wasn't something you enjoyed you can go ahead and put a solid block of the same size in between once again I kept all of my string blocks going in the same direction and I just added this cute little flowery fabric in between you can use a straight white you can use a black or any color you can use a variety of colors in this if you use a 5 or 6 or the whole rainbow you can have a nice variety and then it would actually match all your different blocks but I thought that would help calm down the blocks and of course when I put it if you do a whole quilt like this you'd go ahead and alternate it because right here you would put your solid block and then you put a string so it's more like a checkerboard and I thought that would help calm down the blocks or as I said if you made a few and you decided you've made enough or you don't have enough scraps to make anymore you can go ahead and stop right there and just go ahead and add these in there now I kept using the same contrast fabric so it would kind of coordinated in this quilt but you can use different stuff I just happen to have just enough to work on this quilt with a little bit left over and on this row I went ahead and made half square triangles out of them and once again as you see they're all going in the same direction all of my strings are at the bottom left and I have all of my fabric my contrast up here solid fabric all the same a variety of different ones and that's what that row would look like if you just did half square triangles and they all went in the same direction you can go ahead and line them up so that each row is identical I will probably be making a baby quilt like this because this is stunning I've made so many of these baby coats so far and I got so many done in this short amount of time I don't remember I don't think I've made one completely just like this with the same fabric and a half square triangle all lined up but if I haven't made one of those I think that'll be my next week's quilt and the other one that I plan on adding into this little sampler is I thought I'd go ahead and make some pinwheels now these will take up two rows in my quilt because you know you need to have two rows you have to have four blocks to make a pinwheel and that's just alternating it's still half square triangles and that's just having them spin and alternating them as they go around and I made two of those blocks I thought those are really nice but I wanted to do it's gonna use three of these to go across the row but I wanted to do one more thing to show you well technically it's to I have not so nice completely together but I thought some flying case would be fun too so you could stitch these together and I will put a pinwheel block on each side of it and let this be the center and if you didn't want to do the flying geese if you just go ahead and alternate this block this way you would have a center square here so when you sew it together this way you will have your your main contrast fabric here if you were to make an entire quilt of these as you will put them together you would have your string blocks together and they would make a secondary design or if you stitch this together in the opposite way where you put these little wings into the center of your goose here and you'd put your square together you would have all of these and then these would be on the outside so if you only wanted one block you have to decide if you want to have your contrast fabric in the center and if you want it to be all the same or if you'd prefer to leave your strings in the center I only made one of these so I can't show you the opposite but once you go ahead if you'd made a whole tyre quilt like this which one again if I have enough string blocks I might go ahead and make one like this also but I decided that I wanted to have the flying East in mine so I will have it that way and I will have the pinwheels on either side now since all of these are going to be using the half square triangles I thought today I just showed you what I'm going to put together into my quilt but then I'm going to show you actually how to make the half square triangles so that you can kind of play around and decide how you want to put your strings together and if you want to use half square triangles at all so I'm going to go ahead and sew these into a baby quilt and if you want to see what they look like go ahead and go back to my talk to me Tuesday are my whippet Wednesday a couple days ago this week and you'll see what it looks like in a full-size quilt but like I said I'm gonna show you the ones with the black and the string blocks and that's what we're gonna do our half square triangles with some of you may remember this baby quilt that I made a few weeks ago I decided it ended up being something like 31 by 36 or some weird odd number like that and I wanted to make it more 36 by 36 and enlarge it just a little bit so that it was wide enough cuz as it is 36 is already a small enough baby quilt and I don't like to go to much narrower even though it will work any stroller or whatever but this way it matches all the rest of my quilts and then we can be all matchy-matchy so I need to put one more column or one more row depending on how I turn the blanket of these half square triangles so that's what we're gonna work on today I'm gonna show you how I made these and walk you through the process of making them I have a couple left over that it never made it into the blanket so I will be using these and one of the things we need to think about when we're doing these half square triangles we've already made our string blocks so we're pretty well set at a size but when you make half square triangles and we're gonna do it in the method where we draw a line down the center and we stitch on both sides of it we cut up the center and then we end up with two half square triangles blocks since these are already made these are six-and-a-half inches when we finish these after we take them out cut them apart so I'm and trim them down and everything we're gonna end up with blocks that are 5 and 1/2 inches so your basic math is whatever size finished half square triangle you need your original pieces of fabric or in this case a block needs to be an inch larger so if you wanted them to finish in your quilt at five inches that would mean this block right here is five and a half inches because of our seam allowance I know it always sounds so complicated when we first start doing these things as a new quilter but once you start making them these numbers are just gonna roll right off your tongue also and when you hear them it's not gonna sound like gibberish or foreign language we just need to know that any time we sew our fabric together into a quilt we're going to lose a quarter inch seam allowance on both sides so that's why we end up losing all the way around we lose that half an inch so this started at five and a half I sewed it into my quilt it'll be five inches as you see each of these blocks are five inches since I already have my string blocks ready I've already made them and I've removed the paper and everything these are six and a half inches I went ahead and I cut my contrasting fabric six and a half inches to make the block if you were making nine and a half or twelve and a half inch string blocks then you would cut that fabric exactly the same to match that block there's a few different ways you can make half square triangles but I'm just gonna stick with the simple the one that I learned the very first time is you just put your fabrics together and as I said we're gonna draw up we're gonna sew down on either side of the central line cut it in the middle and then we'll have our two blocks so for every six and a half inch block that I have here I'm gonna get two half square triangles now there's there's a couple different ways that we could still do this I have a ruler and I have a riot variety of marking pens and what we can do is we can just line up our ruler from corner to corner and then just draw a line straight down the center and then when we take it to our sewing machine as you see my line straight down the center you would just go ahead and sew a quarter inch on one side then you would spin it around and sew a quarter inch on the other side of that line now you can do that I do put my center mark down there sometimes but then after a while I started figuring out it was sometimes it's hard with your sewing machine to get exactly a quarter inch on either side of this line so I found that it was easier just to mark those two sewing lines versus the line down the center and that way I know every single block I make is going to be at least stitched the same way and that's gonna make all of my blocks become to the same size and match more easily so I have this ruler I don't remember what it's called but it's from on the grid and I believe it's just called a 1/2 inch ruler I think that might be all that it's called I purchased mine on Amazon if I can find it again I will go ahead and link it down below but mine came in a three pack I know there's only two here but the third one I use when I make my hand sewing blocks so that I can go ahead and use that to mark my quarter inch seam line so it came with a long one this one is 12 inches this one is four and the other one is either six or nine I've been doing mine right here on the black fabric my options for marking on the black fabric since my blue pen is not going to work a mechanical pencil won't show up on the black you can get one of these this is labeled a dress maker but it's also have ones that are called quilting pencils they have white and they have yellow and they have gray you could use a a colored pencil a white or yellow colored pencil to mark on it they also have this is a fons importer it is full of chalk and it has this little metal wheel on it so when you draw on fabric it leaves a chalk line and mostly it does stay there but you ends up you could end up brushing it away as you're doing your sewing or moving it from spot to spot I like to use this when I'm cutting out certain things and I am working on black or if I'm going to go ahead and maybe I'm working on a quilting design I might want to use that recently I pulled out of my stash of pens this is an ornament ball marker that I picked up at the Dollar Tree this is from crafters square I'm not sure if it's their brand but they always have a lot of crafter square products there and this is to write on an ornament ball those plastic or glass ornament balls you can buy but it's white I was testing it out one time and I thought well it's a white marker white pen let me go ahead and give that a try I believe other pen manufacturers also have a white that you can test out now as you can see it has a pretty thick tip on it so I definitely want to make sure that I'm going sideways and not straight up and down but I lined up my yellow line so that it goes on to my two points it's right there on my corners and then I just took my marker I drew down one side you can reach over and go right handed or you can just practice a little ambidextrous this is kind of good to get your brain in your body working in a different way and then I have my white marks on either sides I did test this out and it did line up with my quarter inch I was measuring with this one right here and I was using my presser foot and my needle and everything to line up a quarter inch off of here and I was able to line it right up so my little white marks there are actually three of them a little bit underneath that thread you can possibly see so it was pretty accurate as long as I kept my pen on the side then I took my my then I grabbed my string block and I put it so that I had my long piece going left and right and I had my my corner pieces that I stitched on pretty much at the top and bottom here because when I stitch it on I want to make sure that the corners that I'm going through so when I cut it in half that I have my blocks going this way now you can put it this way if you would like you're just going to get a different look so that when you stitch it all of your blocks are going to be going this way where on this one I have them all going diagonal I got more room you see did I get more one two three four five six seven so I've got three and a half strips of fabric this way and I got seven strips this way I like the way it looks this way it gives it a little bit better contrast and a little bit more movement to the quilt and stuff cuz this way I could just cut it in half I could just cut it from corner to corner with my rotary cutter zip cut triangles here zip stitch them together and I would get the same thing but I like the contrast going the other way so I would take this to my sewing machine if you would like you can add a couple pins I would pin out in these triangle areas so it's out of the way for when you're sewing and that would hold it all together nice and neat for you so nothing would move and then I would just keep stacking these on top of each other I would keep making them I would go ahead and make as many as I could so today or I might just go ahead and pin them all together ahead of time and then come back and so the next day and when I take them to my sewing machine I'm gonna stitch along this line and I'm gonna let that one hang off the edge of the machine and then I'm just gonna go ahead and follow it through with the next one and I'm gonna keep stitching along and I just let it keep going through and I would do that with all of my blocks until I got to the end and when I got to my last one I would take all of my blocks spin them around and this way I can keep continuously chain piecing them and I don't have to actually stop to snip them apart or anything when I got to the last one I would just pull it out of my machine just a little bit to let the thread just a little bit an inch or two and then when I spin it around I'll be able to start sewing here you can see that I did it this is where I cut my thread after I went around that corner and then I would stitch down the opposite side and then once again I would just keep chain piecing up and keep feeding him through until I was done then after they come out of the machine I just take my scissors and I'd snip in between the two of them and I'd be all set now after I had a most stitch I take him over to my pressing station and I go ahead and set the seams you know how after we run I need our blocks through the sewing machine we go ahead and press the threads down to make sure it settles into the fabric so that they're not sticking up a little bit so when you fold it back even one little thread can put you off so you want to make sure that you go ahead and set your seams I press them all to make sure them all nice and neat once again I stack them all up on the side of my cutting table when I was done my next step would be to take them you could go ahead and just cut these with your scissors if you want if you have the line already on there you can follow on the line but if you don't have that line available because we only drew down to two sides I just take a little a larger ruler than what my block is my block is six and a half so I grabbed my nine and a half inch ruler since it's a nine and a half inch ruler I have the this is the little half part here so I have the quarter inch marked on either side so what I like to do is I like to use this quarter inch mark here but you can use any of the ones that you have along the side of your ruler I just like this one because it has at this little last edge there's not a lot of printing on it when we're over on this side we have all these different little markers here so we know where we're at this way I don't have to look through a lot I lined my quarter inch up on either one of these lines you know the one over on the left I could flip my square either way it wouldn't matter and once I have it lined up just go ahead and hold down on my ruler and I sliced through a little bit of pressure because we're going through a lot of this different seam allowances there I cut all of mine up I make two stacks like this or I can just always flip one like this if I'm cutting a bunch of these 10 or 20 of them it's just as easy to go like this and then every time I just keep stacking them up and then when I have my two piles then I can flip them together it's less movements on your hands and your wrists because if you're doing this a hundred times you can go ahead and get that repetitive strain as you want it at all so it's always nice to be kind to your wrists in your hands and not do as many movements if you don't have to I stack them all up and I put the two stacks together and I take them over to my pressing station I find since I'm using black it's easy for me just to press to this side if you're using white you might want to make a different decision but since I have all of these different seams here I find it easier to just go ahead and press over to the single solid fabric versus trying to press all of these having to press all of these this way my block naturally wants to lay this way so I'm going to go ahead and take it the easy way and not struggle and fight against my block even if I were using a light colored fabric I would still go ahead and do this you may get a little shadowing in it but it's it's up to you you can go either way but I find it's easier to just press this and have that little extra bit of shadowing then to put the double of seam allowances because not only do I have to press this over but now I have I have this seam allowance and the blue and the black and now I'm gonna have to quilt over and also this way I just have everything just laying nicely when I press it over to the single fabric like this everything lays flat it's not as thick of a bump to go over when I'm quilting and after its pressed the only thing left to do is to go ahead and trim it up now you're going to trim these to whatever size you're using now as I'm looking at this my square is actually six inches I could trim them all to six inches but I had a couple and when I was doing the quilt that were just under six a little bit so I went ahead and just trimmed everyone down to five and a half inches and that way I knew I could use all of my blocks and not have to worry about it I used to have a problem before I started using the new sewing machine that had an actual quarter inch where my needle moved over to the quarter inch mark and I had a quarter inch foot I always struggled getting my seams just perfectly so if you're getting your seams all exactly right and all of your blocks are coming out at six inches then just go ahead and trim them up to that size unless you've already figured your quilt at five and a half inches I mentioned that you need to add and make your blocks an inch bigger than what you want your final blocks to be I remember reading online many many years ago that that was the formula you used and then after everything's pressed I would just go ahead and I would kick my my rotary cutter and my ruler and I would just go ahead and trim everything down to the size that I'm going for I'm going to go ahead and put a link up in the iCard to a video where I showed you how to trim down your half square triangles sometimes you might only have to trim off the little dog ears or just a little bit of a sliver and depending on how some of your blocks might get maybe they shifted a little when you were stitching you're stitching lines weren't quite right then you might have to trim off a little bit extra so that's it they look really nice and complicated when you put them in your quilts but making string blocks and half square triangles they're really easy to do and they get it into this zigzag pattern all's I did is I alternated and I had two V's of my string block and then when I went down to the next section I would have two more so you're just on this way you end up with the pyramids going up with your with your string blocks and down here you have these little pyramids or your V's going down once you just start laying it out it'll be really easy to see with your eye if you start putting together and you get something like this then you know you don't have it quite right so your blocks are either going to look like this or they're going to look like that now right now I have six across so that's an even number but I am going to be adding these down the side so I will end up with an odd number and I don't think it really matters to me I don't mind how it looks which way it ends at mine are gonna end up looking like this so one way or another I have this going down or I have it going up either way it's going to end in one direction or the other I kind of like the way it goes down like this but then at the beginning you have it as it starts at the top so it doesn't really matter how many you put in when I did it with an even number I have it starting go at the top going down and I have an ending going up so each row is gonna alternate I have it finishing off I have the last zigzag is a colored area and my first zigzag is a black one so it all depends on how you want it to look add or subtract rows or columns as needed to get the way your quilt you want your quilt to look so I hope that helped everyone out who had any questions on how I made these half square triangles using the string blocks if you have any more questions please go ahead and leave them down below in the comments and I will help you out and if I need to make another video to show you anything else I'll go ahead and do that unless you guys have any other questions this is going to end the series on the string blocks I showed you a couple different ways on how you can use them there's still many more as I mentioned before you can go on Pinterest and look up different ideas for using string blocks there's a lot of fun and crazy ways to do them I'm just doing the little baby quilts and I'm not planning anything so I was just doing the scrappy version so I really like the way this came out and I like the ones we're everything lined up just like this I really enjoy the way these look too so I'm going to be making some more baby quilts like this and as I showed earlier you can also have it this way with going down lines that way there's there's plenty there's many many different ways you can go ahead and make some mock-ups after you get yours all done put them up on your design wall and just switch things around until you find something that looks good for you and then remember to take a picture of it so that once you take it off your design wall and start sewing it you won't get confused and mix up any of the rows so thanks for hanging out with me in the craft room while I explored some more string block options I'm sure I know I'm going to be making many many more because it's a great way for me to use up my scraps I find it really relaxing now some of you have found out there's a little secret when you shut your craft room door at the end of the night after working on your string blocks your scraps just seem to multiply now don't they so what happens is is when you're starting to put your scraps and containers and we start digging through them they get fluffed up so it's that little fluff monster that makes it look like you have more scraps than you started with what I found this time around is I used to do that process just grab my scraps you know cut off a piece with some scissors or rotary cutters stitch it down and off I went this time I took one of my plastic shoeboxes I cut all my strips ahead of time and I put them all into the bucket I had thin ones thick ones I could separate the longer ones in one container and shorter ones in another however it works for you and I found that I was actually emptying my containers that way so as I was using up my strips of course the the little container is gonna get emptied because it's just a small little shoebox and then I go and I fill it up with some more scraps so then it felt like I was actually accomplishing something so my stack of scraps was actually going down instead of multiplying in the dark like bunny rabbits so if you're getting discouraged because your scraps just seem to get bigger and bigger and bigger maybe you might want to try that technique just throw them and take a small amount that are already cut up put it in a small container and that way you can see how it's emptying out as you're going because we know you're using your scraps because you have you have a hundred or 200 of your string blocks on mates so we know you've used them you're not creating more you just still have more left to use so that's it for me please remember to Like subscribe and ring that little bell if you'd like youtube to let you know what's going on if you're interested pop on over to my patreon page the link is down below and we're having more conversations about different blocks and fabrics and there's other videos and stuff for you to watch over there if you're looking for me anywhere else on the internet on facebook if you're looking for my email Instagram anything like that my blog everything's down in the description box underneath the videos sometimes you have to hit that little arrow or you have to click see more read more show me more depending on what device you're on and then there'll be a box down below where I list all that types of information and if you have any friends who might be interested in working through their scraps with us please go ahead and use that little share button down there and fight them on over and they can join us in using up their scraps so that's it until next week I'm not 100% sure of what we're going to be doing next week so it's going to be a surprise for both of us but I do have a few ideas in mind that you guys might be interested in so until next time I'll see you later bye

Channel: RsIslandCrafts - Robin

Views: 72,395

Keywords: quilt, sew, sewing, knit, knitting, tutorials, podcast, quilting for beginners, crumb quilt, sew with me, scrap quilt, quilting podcast, quilt podcast, hst, half square triangle quilt, half square triangle tutorial, half square triangle quilt patterns, string blocks quilt, string piecing quilt blocks, string quilt, quilting tutorial, strip quilt

Id: fYkIcSm-iHg

Length: 33min 29sec (2009 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019