Scrappy Trips Challenge 2024 - Part 1 - sew strips
Welcome to the Scrap Quilt Challenge for 2024. This year there is no quilt size limit. Make as many blocks as you have fabric.
This post includes information on collecting, cutting and sewing strips.
COLLECT
Go through your stash of fabric and pull out anything that you think you can use. When I make quilts I like to stick to either commercial prints, batiks or hand dyed fabrics as separate categories or collections. Solids can slide into any of these categories. You are free to limit the range of fabrics to a single line of fabrics, to a manufacturer, to a colour range or value range. Or you can go super scrappy and make use of it all! I am excited to see what you can come up with!
My friend and I have started quilts. I'm using batiks and she is using commercial prints. Our completed blocks already look so very different.
One of the things that helps to add definition to the diagonal lines in the block is to choose a single fabric, colour or value to use as a constant. You'll see by the following examples that the constant will appear in each block and run diagonally through the block.
CUT
Once you've collected fabrics, you'll need to start cutting the strips.
Each strip needs to be cut 2 1/2" wide and 16" long. If you are using Width of Fabric strips, you'll get two 16" units from each strip. You can either leave the remainder of each strip to use in the borders or cut them into 2 1/2" squares and save for another project or the border of these quilts.
For each block you will need 6 strips of fabric. Choose a constant (if you wish) and 5 other strips of fabric. In the image below, I'm planning to use a yellow/orange as my constant.
SEW
Arrange and sew the 6 strips together along the long edge.
When all 6 strips are sewn together, join the first and last strips and sew that seam so you will have a tube. When I sew the strips together I make sure that one edge (the top) is always even so that when I join the tube, my strips are nice and straight. If you find that you have a twist in the fabric, undo the seam and smooth the strip set out and sew as best you can.
The great thing about this project is no pressing yet! We'll deal with pressing at the very end. I have a few tricks to show you.
Now take a break, have a cuppa and see what other treasures are hiding in your stash that you can incorporate into your quilt.
As a heads up... you will need at least 9 blocks or strip sets for the smallest quilt and either 12, 20 or more for larger quilts.
Here's a handy list of the dates of publication and links to previous posts.
May 6: Invitation and Introduction
May 20: Turn strips into blocks
May 27 : Arrange and sew the blocks into a quilt top (or two)
June 3: Border ideas (scrappy) - Piano Keys and Checkerboard
June 10: Binding - I'll do a tutorial on the Faux Piped Binding
Remember, it's not a rush. Just something to encourage us to sew and use up what we have.
Happy Quilting.
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