Learn to Make an EASY String Quilt! | Prairie Point Quilt & Fabric Shop

Well, hello, I'm Susan from Prairie Pointe

quilt

ing

fabric

store in Lenexa Kansas and I want to do a video here, a little tutorial for you on how to

make

a thread

quilt

, so it's very

easy

to do. I will have a free pattern. our website for you, but you could probably do it from what I show you here today, so the idea of ​​this is a base piece and we're going to attach the strips of

fabric

, these are ropes that you just cut the fabric. You just have to sew them with small threads on a muslin base and it is a great quilt to use your scraps if you have something hidden that you want to cut up or just scraps that you don't know what else to do with or how to use.

They're not good for many things, but they're too good to throw away. This is the way to use them like in a thread quilt. As an aside, all right, I'm going to show you some of the things we're going to do here, so these are the little blocks and start with the little six inch ones here so you can

make

all kinds of fun things and then look, just grab fabrics from a lot of collections. of different fabrics that you have and put them together in a block and they just really come together. Well, this is a very old technique and it was done I don't know how many years ago people started doing this, probably even in the 19th century, but I want to show you this here that someone did in a newspaper.

Let's do it. It's in Muslim, but this was done in newspaper and then the idea would be to remove the paper, but it's complete, it's from 1949, it has a date on it, so it's an old block and I'll show you some photos that came. from some magazines probably 15 or 20 years ago or so, but these are old quilts in the magazines, you can see how people use some of them. I'm sure back then it was a great way to use leftover or unused clothing. Also, here's one that shows this old quote with a frame between the blocks and there's another one that shows much larger blocks together and here's a sort of kaleidoscope effect keyhole and look how crooked it is and it looks like a really modern quilt. but it's actually old so this thing I'm going to show you here is after you make your blocks and stuff so I'm going to cut them out and then you're going to put them together into a bigger block so I like to call them little block unit and then this is the block that you will have so in the instructions that I have written I mean this is the block with all four sewn together and you can make it in any color shape you want just choose you know what you think the things that you love and that's the fun thing and it's a great way to put a lot of fabrics from your previous quilts into a single quilt and then you have kind of a little keepsake of things that I've made in the past and here's one that's made with a lot of block bigger and that is the one in the demonstration that I am going to do for you today.

The largest block is fine, so we will start with a muslin base for these blocks and several meters of muslin will be needed. I recommend washing the muslin first so it will cut, shrink and press and then you have a whole stack of muslin squares that you are going to use and if you know how big we are going to make it, then we will just cut that many squares and if not, then you know you can go back and cut more later, get more muscle and then we're going to cut some strips, so if you're cutting from your scrap if you have at home, you might have scraps of different shapes and sizes and everything, so this It's a good way to use them, but they could end up making a mess if you have small squares left over from a quilt.

Half square triangles are great at this and I'll show you how very soon and my little pile can start out very neat at first, but as I start using them and take them out it usually turns into a big jumble. stack, so these are some leftovers that I've had for a while, but this is what I'm working on today. As you can see, I have my scrap pile on top, but I left you a nice little collection here, so I usually just cut all my strips and this is cut from yardage, so it's not cut from my stash or from the scraps I have at home, so it looks even cleaner than you know it could be if you did it with your scraps, but I'll put them here and then when I start taking them out and using them, I'll have smaller ones left over, it'll become a little messy so I'll put them back in there, here are some used ones. strips that I have that I will use again very soon, so for my blocks I will start with a square like this and I will take one of my strips out of my little box and place it right there. in the middle, that's fine and I usually have the center.

I don't have to have the center, but I usually make sure the corner is well covered. I don't want to start with these, the edge right at the corner of the corner or even where the seam lines are going to be because that's going to create extra volume in those areas when you sew one block to another, so I'm going to put this one right on top of there and I'm going to sew right there now. You can trim it now before you sew or you can wait until after you sew so it continues there and then here's an example of the seam line, okay, so I'm going to press that back like this and I'm going to do that on the iron on. here and I want to make sure I press it all the way in, I don't want there to be any little bumps there, so I'm going to take that and then I'm going to take another piece to get a long one out of there and I'm going to put it on the other side and I'm going to sew it up nice, so that's going to be the next step. and then it will look like this one here, so we have two strips sewn together now.

I also do a strip on one side, then the other side and then I'll go to the iron and that's the second step until I get to the ironing board, wherever your honor is, so I'm going to press that. It doesn't actually hurt, just put the seam first, press that one so it's nice and smooth and then I'll take another strip and okay, that one isn't long enough so I'll have to find a longer one because I'm afraid we'll end up stuck there, so let's say we put two of them there. I have two more. I'm going to press down, press down, I said like this, okay and I'm going to go all the way. to the edge and just keep going and this is where the half square triangles left over from your scraps could come in handy or if you have a square that you can cut into the corners, the corners of the triangle would come in handy there instead of using other strips that go to waste more fabric, but you know, either way you want to do that, okay, and then I have another one here, okay, these are my finished ones, so what I'm going to do here is show you what it looks like when you're all done.

When you have all the pieces there and you get to the corners, the muslin will be completely covered, so we're going to take a square ruler which is probably the most useful and easiest to use for that, so I'm going to cut them into nine inch squares and half. I don't remember if I told you that my muslin squares are ten inches while the little ones that I showed you at the beginning or they cut seven inches okay so I'm going to look at this and I'm not going to cut it on this side because I want to be sure and get all the muslin in, so I'm going to turn it inside out and you probably can't see it because the thread is mixed up, but there are all these seam lines here. where they are sewn and well, I'm thinking about the thread you use for this.

It's a great way to use up any leftover thread you have if you have thread colors that you really have no other use for. I'll use these if you have spools that are half full and you want that color not to be on that spool, this is a good time to use all those different thread tips and spools that you have, okay? to put the ruler right here on the muslin square and this is a ten and a half inch ruler but I'm going to have two of my sides right here the nine and a half inch lines are right inside the muslin square so I'm I'm going to take my period.

I'm going to turn this around. I'm going to place it on the nine and a half inch line here on the other two sides. If you have a nine and a half inch square ruler, that's ideal too. Okay, turn it over and It's fun to see how these magically turn out to be beautiful blocks, so looking like this they don't look too ugly because the fabrics here are full, but they don't look the same until you cut them, so I'm going to stop show you that again here a little bit what is she doing? It's the same process.

You can do this with your usual six and a half by 24 inch ruler. It's just easier to do with the square ruler like this. All these beautiful blocks, okay? and then when you're done with that, you'll end up with a bunch of little scraps like this and don't just throw them away, you can use them again in little places like in the corners, but if you have to put something in there that will come back and just make your corner right. when you have to get to those areas, okay, so let's move on to the squares that I have here and when you have them all together, you're going to place them on the table.

On the floor, a big table if you have one and actually, you're going to put the blocks together first, so I'm going to put four of these together and you won't have to look at them too much and decide. which ones you go together will probably look great and one thing is it's nice to have these seams that don't meet, these don't line up like some patterns. I will make you make these types of blocks. where everything is lined up it's not really a

string

quilt, they just cut it into strips and make it really symmetrical.

This is supposed to be a little twisted and I think that gives it a lot of charm, so some things like this. here both corners don't look alike this one is too close to the corner okay it's not going to be perfectly symmetrical and that's okay another thing you can look for on these is when you do something like this and here so one thing I could avoid is putting these two next to each other because that will really stand out in the quilt. There's a big V there, just flip this one here if you have scenes that get too close. in the center, rotate it or move them to get another block or something so that you don't have a lot of scenes collected right there in the center of the block, right after you do that, you will have two of these together here and then over there, but you will press the seams to open them up as you go because of the base of the base here, you won't have any problems with the seams hitting hard there, so go ahead and press them open, that really reduces the bulk because you have all those edges that are they extend that volume and that will suit you, so now I want to show you a couple more things as you start doing them.

I usually make them ten or twelve at a time, so what do I do? What I'm going to do is start doing something like this. I'll start chaining them together, so I'll also put a strip in the middle of one so that my first strip goes into the next one and I'll do it over and over again until I have a chain of about ten or twelve of these, okay, then I'll cut them out, separate them and then I'll go back and sew another piece on the other side and do that with the ten and then I'll take them. all to my ironing board and I press them like this very securely and then I just start going to each side again and repeat that process then when they're all done and cut I'll start another ten of them and do it again.

It breaks it down, but I don't feel like it's very boring to do so, it's a lot of fun to see how each block comes together. The more fabrics you have, the more fun it can be and the more variety you will have. Placing your blocks out there, if you only had 10 or 12 fabrics, would probably look a lot different than if you did. I have 24 fabrics here, but I'm going to show you some quilts that have even more than that. What we've made here is made up of a collection of fabrics, so they're all tilda fabrics, they're not all from the same tilda line, but they're all tilda and they go together really well and it's fun to mix them up.

So what I've done is cut some fat quarters of those and this is what's available and you'll have all these quite different fabrics to choose from to cut your strips, so again just cut your strips and the strips will be cut anywhere. from an inch and a quarter to two and a half inches, I would have minus one and a quarter and minus two and a half and I would have most of them in the middle, but you can adjust them as you go if you feel like you have too many of the widths that there are there they move the strip a little bit to have a wider seam there and then you can make it narrower, you can even put it there a little bit crooked so that you have crooked shaped strips there.

I don't know if there are any of these, okay, so we have bundles for that, if you're interested in something like that and I want to show you some of the quilts that I have here, this is one of the first ones that I have. I've made this with six inch blocks, so you have a lot of fabrics that just coordinate, but they don't actually all coordinate in every way. Put them together in a quilt, but for a thread quilt you can do that. with it and use your scraps and people do this, cut all their strips to make a quilt and they don't even notice a dent in their scraps because you have a lot of them, but use quite a bit, you'll use six to eight yards of rip2, put them together in your waste, the packages here will be six and a half yards and will let you know it's probably close. to a double size quilt so what I did on this one was pin it with straight line seams and just go back and forth along about a half inch from the seam and then I wantedmore there to hold it together. so I tied it in the center with pearl cotton so that each block has a tie to hold it together and then you just find that fun backing and put the binding on it and you don't have to quote it yourself that way, this one was quilted. on the long arm and this is made with the largest blocks so it has a lot of Kate facets, Annie Butler and Michael Miller print motifs and fun things like that that come together and you know again it could be kind of a great I remember what you have used and made in the past with your different script fragments and you can even exchange them with friends, so I hope you enjoyed this video and had fun making this quilt.

That's the only thing I like about it, it's kind of a no-brainer, you don't have to think a lot, plan, do math and worry if you're doing the wrong thing or not getting much out of it, just make sure your attention is right. When you do it. and press the seams on the sides before moving on to the next. I think finger pressing is not good enough. You're going to have little lumps and bumps there and that's not desirable, so thanks for looking and we'll do some. more videos for you later