Transcript:
Hi, I’m Jenny, from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. We love our forums at the Missouri Star, and a lot of women get on there and talk about lots of different things. One of those women was Shellscraps. She had been over to Cozy Quilt Designs and seen a tutorial of something they called tube quilting. Well I went over there and watched that and was pretty excited about it, and wanted to try it myself. Her question was, could it be done with a regular ruler? So, here’s what we did.
So, the first thing we’re going to do on this project, is cut two strips of contrasting fabric 2 ½” wide. So, this would be a great project for a Jelly Roll as well. So, we’ve done that, and then we’re going to sew them together using a ¼” seam. OK, so we’re going to sew these two strips together using a ¼”, and we’ll sew all the way down. OK, so now we have your two strips all sewn together. You set your seam and then you press to the dark side, always to the dark side. Open that up and these are cut the width of the fabric by the way, 2 ½”, width of the fabric, sewn end to end. OK, so now that we have these ironed, and pressed, and open, we’re going to measure them and see how wide they are. They should come out to be 4 ½” if you’ve sewn a ¼” and these do! So, what we want to do now is we’re going to cut an additional strip of fabric that’s 4 ½” wide and this will also be the width of the fabric. It should be a lighter contrasting color, you can see that ours is beige, and it will pick up the red and green. So, when we put this together you’re just going to be amazed at what happens.
So, now we’re going to lay this on top of eachother and we are going to sew both sides of this ¼” seam and make a tube. OK, so we place these right sides together and we’re going to sew a ¼” seam all the way down to enclose it. I know this sounds kind of strange but we are doing is we’re making a tube. When you sew long seams like this you want to be sure to change directions often so that your fabric doesn’t bow. This is only two seams so it won’t be bad at all, but if you sewed all your seams going in one direction it would create a bow in the pattern. So, we’re just going to turn these around and sew back down the other direction, with our sides matched up, ¼”. So, here we are at the end of our tube, let’s just finish this up. There we go, all done. Now over to the cutting table. So, you can see that this is a tube and we’ll lay it out here. We’re going to use this Omnigrid ruler which is a 9 ½” square I imagine you could do anyone that has the fourty-five degree line on it, and that’s the line that will give us our angles. So, you lay that line on your ¼” seam, so, that we can make a cut here that will give us the top point of our first cut. Now I’m left handed, so, I’m doing this left handed and we will bring Natalie in to show you how to make a right handed cut, a little bit down. So, the next thing we want to do is we want to slide this down here and put it on the bottom seam line. See how easy that was? It makes a point and we make a cut. We’re going to slide it up, we’ll move this out of here, see this is the block that you get. Put it right along the seam line and we make another cut. This is going to be so amazing when you see what happens when we open these up. We’ll finish cutting these and really all we need is four for our demonstration. So, this will be the last one we’ll cut, before the magic begins! Alright, now we have four of these blocks and you can get four more out of this tube. When you open them up this is what you get a little piece of magic! Look at that. Now, what’s fun about this is because of the way they’re cut the entire center will be opposites and so what you’re making is a double hourglass, set on point! How cool is that! Let’s go over and iron these so you can get an even better look. So, we set our seams and then we’ll lift them up, and press them over to make this lay flat. I think if you had three of these blocks it would make the most darling table runner.
OK, so here we are back at the cutting table with our nice pressed block, and we lay them out, and you can see once again that this is a double hour glass, set on point. Three of these blocks with a little 3” sashing around them would make the most darling table runner ever. Now we’re going to have Natalie show how to cut it from the right handed side, because it’s basically the same idea it just takes a little bit different angle. So, we’ll have her come over and show that.
Alright, the only difference between a left-handed and a right-handed cut is which side you start on. So we’re going to do this from this side. Just the same as she did this before. Lining the fourty-five degree angle line up with your seam, and making your cuts.
OK, so now that you’ve seen the left-handed and the right-handed way. Let’s see what else we can do with these blocks besides the double hour glass. So, we figure we can put them together, and make the double square. We could do something wild and crazy, and line them up so they make a kind of chevron thing. We just never, I guess we can do all kinds of things! So this is really a fun technique, and it’s something you’ll enjoy that’s quick! So, out of three strips of fabric we’ve been able to make two and a half blocks. And it takes very little fabric to make this, and you’ll have a table runner in no time with this tube technique. We hope you’ve enjoyed this from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Happy sewing!
