Agilejack’s Crumb Piecing Tutorial

May 03, 2023

alright here is my little

crumb

splicing

tutorial

check out the text at the bottom of this video for the blog post associated with this video so i already set up my pieces here i have a stack of pieces that are pretty much they all have a straight edge on them and I have another stack here that you strip there's not a lot of strip but I use them when I can so let's get started the first thing I'm going to do is start sewing some pieces that are just straight edge to straight edge, we just whip them, we string them together, so the first thing I'm going to show you is I like to take two pieces that are relatively the same size, I like two pieces that have relatively straight edges I put them together I just run them through the machine, so I'm trying to keep a quarter inch seam allowance where i can you dont want less than that its ok to have more than that but i certainly dont want less than that and as i go i am trying to select fabrics that are not the same i want to get a variety i dont i want to have the same two fabrics together so you can see i'm just feeding these through the machine one after the other here's a long thing i'm going to put that aside oh this is pretty long so these two they can go together they are quite long so find kind of a straight edge on those two they fit nice together feed them through the machine you can see i just keep all the pieces connected they are all connected by a thin thread just we're going to go ahead and continue until I feed all of those through the machine here's something this is a piece that's actually a

crumb

that I've assembled before but it's in that stack so I'm just going to use it I'm going to put together this with her and sew her up.

That's beautiful about crumbs if there's something left over and it's big enough to sew it back put it back in the pile there's nothing wrong with that so I would keep going through this whole pile until I had all those pieces together that it will take a while, it will take a few minutes. to do that I'm going to show you how to do it with a strip of fabric so here's a strip of fabric this is probably I don't know about 10 inches long I'm just going to put these pieces on that strip of fabric and sew them on it pulls it one after the other it just continues to feed them so I'll put that in there then I'll put it in there and you can put them horizontally or vertically or you know here's another one horizontal I'm going to try to put another one here so I put it vertically then I find another that it fits that way so there we go I'm just going to feed them in keeping that quarter inch seam allowance it's not like that. it has to be exactly a quarter of an inch, but you don't want less than that, you want to make sure that when you sew this onto whatever you're sewing, whether it's a quilt or a bag, you want to make sure that those seams will hold it. i dont want your seams to come undone so my crumb quilting guru said crumb quilting is more interesting the smaller the piece the more interesting the crumb quilting so i try to follow that they can be crooked , they can be square like you If you want them to be irregular, if they are all regular, it will look like you did a bad job of matching square blocks, so if you make them irregular, then it looks really irregular, then it looks like it was totally accidental or what you were serious to be a regular instead of you tried to make it regular and you messed it up I have this huge pile of crumb pieces that I have sewn together it's a big long pile of strings that are all connected by a thin thread because I made splicing chains on these , so now I'm going to cut them.

More Interesting Facts About,

agilejack s crumb piecing tutorial...

I've got this really cool tool that has a razor blade here and I can cut through them one after the other very quickly, so I'm going to do that. cut everything in a stack and then I'm going to press everything so I cut all those pieces and I realized I didn't show you what I do with these pieces that are in strips once I put them through there you can see this was in that stack, that huge long string of stuff, so how do I handle this? I just take a rotary cutter and just cut between the pieces.

It doesn't have to be exact, it doesn't have to be precise when you cut it out. drop side, I just put them in the stack with the other stuff, okay, I've got all these pressed pieces, they're trimmed, they're cut and pressed, and I've separated them into three stacks, I've got a stack here. I mean, bigger pieces, you can see they have longer edges, they all have a longer edge, they're a little bit longer, these are smaller pieces, they have two smaller pieces together, these are more irregular pieces, they're like maybe nice kinda big not that big but they're more irregular so I'm going to go to the sewing machine now with my three different stacks and I'm going to start putting those pieces together and sew two pieces to two other pieces until I've done them all right I'm back in the machine I've got my stacks of smaller pieces some regular pieces and some larger pieces we're going to start putting them together so what I'm looking for I want to find a piece that's a little long and then I want to find a piece that is maybe a little bit shorter and I don't want to put them in the same direction I don't want to sew everything together so the seams match up I want to flip them so the seams are opposite and that way you get a little more interesting splice so it fits quite nicely let's go ahead and stitch that together so we're going to go and sew two pieces to two pieces again I've got my stitch length set to 2.1 I'm going to start pushing these things through the machine I'm going to do the same chain splice that I did earlier so I'm going to spread them out a bit so I can find some smaller pieces here okay so again I'm going to put them together like this and sew them there straight edge to straight edge take another one of these I have two take this put this on that edge now there's not much of a straight edge there so i'll figure it out and sew a larger seam to get at least a quarter inch that's all it doesn't have to be exact that's the beautiful thing it's approximate , which is fun oh here's another game go ahead keep putting this in the machine one after another one after another so I'm trying to put the pieces together you don't have to go crazy over this not that you know , you just find something that works with something else, even I can pull two out of that pile, put them together so you only find two pieces that work together and irregularity is good, you don't have to worry about something being irregular, it's good to have irregularities , I'm just going to put all that through the machine putting two pieces to two pieces adjusting them as best as possible I don't worry if things are wrong or if things are crooked everything is very free don't worry about it only if something doesn't work it can throw it away or cut it and use it again so I have all my pressed pieces this is this large stack medium stack small stack and then irregular stack I have arranged them all while pressing them what I am What I'm going to do now is select pieces to sew one to the other side by side, so you could start with a big stack. similar to a size i can put together a lot of these have a maze on them from the same fabric so i will refrain from sewing that piece to that piece because it just doesn't look as good see this one in the middle the piece is from the same fabric so I'm going to refrain from sewing them so it limits what I have available here this one looks pretty good they're pretty similar in size so I'm going to put this one here and I'm going to line that up and then I'm just going to use my ruler I'm going to give myself a nice straight edge to sew so I have a good view if you can see here it's not a perfect straight edge so I want to give myself a straight edge so I'm just going to trim that without trimming much so you can see that I'm just trimming that but that gives me a nice straight edge and I take this and I have a big ruler here it's like a twelve and a half ventrilo and I line them up there on top of there and then I'm ready to sew so I stack them as I go along and then I take that ruler to the sewing machine and I'm ready for it.

I have a trash can right here on my cutting table so I can easily dispose of whatever's left over, whatever I'm cutting out to make these two look pretty. similar so I'm going to trim them to go together similar in size not light color and fabric so I'm just going to trim that straight edge ok so these two pieces are the same fabric so I could probably sew them together together because those are different enough so let's go ahead and do that let me go ahead and put them I see they have the same fabric on opposite corners so I thought oh but I can just sew them like this and those fabrics are going to be the same far enough apart, so just put them together, cut a straight edge, get rid of the scraps, and then stack them here on this, so if you can see this, let me zoom in here, you can see it, so I just have what's there. a set, there's a set, and there's a set, so I stacked those sets of two so that when I go to the sewing machine I can grab a set of two and run them through the machine, so now I'm going to move on to this. medium sized pile the reason I sized them is just to make it easier to put them together so this one is pretty similar I think I'm going to sew it that way I don't want those seams to match because it does bulky and clunky so you can see the seams are a little lined up there if I flip it over that center piece is wider so the seams don't match up as much you just know that couldn't I be obsessed with things with that I really don't need to obsess?

So you can see it's very random. It is very free. They don't have to be exact. an odd shape but it'll be fine because you'll keep making fabric you'll keep sewing pieces together and making fabric that's going to get bigger and bigger so those two I'm looking for pieces that are essentially the same length here that make it more efficient No I'm going to lose so much scrap actually so yeah I love this it's so free it's relaxing there aren't really any rules other than you sew two pieces of fabric together and then sew those two pieces to two other pieces so now let's go to move on to the smaller pieces, so I'm not going to show you that because it's basically the same as the pieces. just smaller but I want to show you this stack of irregular pieces because there are some really crazy pieces here so what I want to do is I just want to create a straight edge on these I want to make the edge as long as I can it's going to be really hard to make match these up with something else if there's no straight edge look how crazy that piece is it's just misshapen and crazy so I just want to get a straight edge so I'm going to go corner to corner make sure now that gives me something I can sew to something else now that goes great together those two are going to go together they already have a straight edge so I don't need to cut I put them together lined them up put them on my board that's right how do you do the jagged piece this is really crazy i mean look at that piece how am i going to deal with it?

I'm going to cut a straight edge. so the way to do it let me see if i can get you a better view look at how it's crooked i'm going to go where i can go along that fabric so that's what i cut so you can see i've only cut enough to get a nice straight edge so these two go together pretty well they fit together great they look great they have great angles its a win ok so im going to keep doing that regularly pieces and then we'll sew them together then I'm going to go through and sew all those two pieces together and I'm going to end up with bigger and bigger pieces okay I'm done sewing all those pairs I put together on the crumb block so i ended up with different sizes of crumb blocks you can start putting them together you can sew them in pairs you can square them to the size they are you can make them into larger pieces and square them to eight inches you could make vertical strips to put on something you could use as a border on your quilt you could use them as blocks you can put anything you want on them the world is open this is how i make crumbs crumbs blocks again go to the link at the bottom of the bottom of this video and find my accompanying blog post to the creation of these chrome blocks you will see some ideas of what you can do with the chrome blocks you will also see a little more description of how i select fabrics and how i go about putting them together thanks for looking go to www.