String Quilt Block Tutorial

I love the thought of surrounding myself in handmade items, preferably that I’ve made myself, and to me nothing seems better than sleeping underneath something that I’ve spent months creating, which is what turned me on to quilting about a year ago.

Unfortunately I didn’t think this plan through very well, I’m not a very precise crafter, and I’m certainly not a patient one, something that I think is required for quilters. So quilt top after quilt top was shoved into a box under my desk labelled “Things I’ve Screwed Up And Never Wish To Look At Ever Again”, then I discovered scrap quilts! Never again would I have to measure and match seams and spend my time cursing because my quarter inch is 0.37mm off. Now I can just throw them together and say that the mismatching is “whimsical”. Perfect.

My favourite scrap quilt block is a simple string quilt, although they look fairly unassuming by themselves, when you bring them together as a full quilt the result is beautiful.

You will need:

• Foundation fabric - This will be hidden when you complete your quilt, so it doesn’t have to be anything special. Muslin is regularly used, just plain cotton, I use a polyester fabric called “suedecloth” simply because I have such a huge amount of scraps from making nappies out of it. Whatever you use just make sure that it doesn’t have any stretch and that it’s neutral enough to not show through your strips.
• Collection of scraps.
• Your “resting fabric” - I’ll explain the need for this later, just pick a plain solid cotton in a colour that you like as it will be appearing in all your blocks.
• Rotary cutter, cutting mat and ruler

Tutorial behind the jump, as always, click on the pictures to embiggen.

Cut your fabric to the size you require. My foundation blocks are 10×10inches and my strips are 2inches wide, you can make the strips as thin as you like, just remember that the thinner the strips the more work required when it comes to sewing! I like using ten inch blocks as when it comes to sewing it together it means things come together very quickly with only a small amount of work.

Depending on the size of your quilt you’ll need a fair amount of your “resting fabric”, this breaks up the chaos that is the strips and allows your eyes to take a break, literally allowing them to rest.

Place your resting fabric diagonally across your freshly ironed foundation piece, if you like you can sew it down at either side to keep it in position, I don’t mind a bit of shifting or mismatching so I don’t tend to bother, suedecloth also has some crazy velcro like properties which helps keep the fabric in place.

Take your next strip and place it right side down on top of the first strip, I like to iron it all again at this point just to be sure that there’s no creases in your strips. Sew along the right hand edge with a quarter inch seam allowance, flip over and iron your second strip down. Get used to ironing, you’ll be doing a lot of it!

One of the best things about this is that you really can use all of your scraps, so long as you’re able to iron them you can throw them into this quilt. Because of the foundation piecing you can use stretch fabrics without it ruining your look, I have several old t-shirts chopped up and thrown into this.

Keep on going! Add strips in exactly the same way until you reach the end of your square. I’ve finished in my resting fabric as well, but this is more of a preference than any kind of requirement, I like the look that it gives of diamonds in the joins when the blocks are pieced together.

Turn your block around and start working on the other side in exactly the same way, working from the middle out to the corner, laying each strip on top of the previous one, sewing, then flipping and ironing it.

Eventually you will end up with something that looks like this, although hopefully less blurry! Flip your block over and using the foundation fabric as a guide trim the edges down. I like to use pinking shears because it can be anything up to a fortnight before I have a collection of blocks to sew together to form the next row and I want to avoid fraying. Keep hold of any strips that are long enough to go into your next block and chuck those little bits out, and some point everyone has to accept that some scraps are just too tiny to do anything with you, I promise the powers that be aren’t going to come after you for putting some fabric in the bin!

As you start to sew the blocks together you will see the great affect that the resting fabric gives. The pieces may not be perfectly matched, but without a huge amount of inspection your eye is trained to think that everything looks perfect, and if anyone gives you grief about things not being perfect, just tell them it’s “shabby chic” and that they’re just jealous of your superb quilting skills!

This is the quilt I’ve been working on for a couple of months now. All of my scraps now get stripped straight away and get thrown into a storage box, if I have an urge to sew but only fifteen minutes spare then I’ve streamlined the process enough that I can throw together one of these blocks without even thinking about it. It’s grown slightly since this photo was taken, it’s now close to 50×50, eventually it will reach single bed size, get backed and quilted and sent to my niece for her bedroom. What I love most about it is that it’s almost a history book of the last two years spent sewing, I can tell you exactly what projects I used each fabric in, where I bought it from and each strip has its own special memory associated with it. Scrap quilts may not be perfect, but I love the story that comes with them.