- Do you have some of these?
A pile of orphan blocks,
they might be from an abandoned UFO,
they might be the winnings of a block lotto,
they might be donations from a quilt bee.
Today, I'm starting a new topic
on what to do with a pile of blocks.
And today's method is the improv.
How to take a mishmash bunch of blocks
and sew them all together to make a quilt.
So stick with me and I'll show you how to do it.
Hi, I'm Karen Brown of Just Get It Done Quilts
and if you like what you see,
please click that subscribe button.
If you've been quilting for awhile,
chances are you've got a pile of orphan blocks
somewhere in your stash.
It may be a pile of five,
it may be a pile of 50,
it may be 500,
just waiting for some inspiration to put them all together.
There are many different strategies you can use
to put blocks together based on what you have.
To know what method to use,
you need to lay all your blocks out,
give them a good look,
and ask the following questions.
How many do you have?
Are they all the same size?
Is there a theme holding everything together?
Is there a common fabric?
Is there a common colour?
And then rank them in how important they are to you
because every pile of blocks has a whole different story.
And just let the image of them
just percolate for awhile in your head.
You might get ideas right away
but I always find it's best to sleep on it
for at least one night.
So today, I have this project.
These blocks are made
by various members of the Toronto Modern Quilt Guild
for the Maritime Modern Quilt Guild's initiative,
Quilts for Nova Scotia.
They are a total mishmash of fabrics and sizes
but what binds them all together is the colour blue.
So based on that,
the fact that this is a Modern Guild project,
I will be using an improv technique
to pull them all together.
So an improv quilt is about making decisions in the moment.
You follow whatever rules you choose to set for yourself
with only one absolute rule,
and that is that it has to lie flat.
This quilt is also going to be a lap quilt
and another Guild member is going to be long-arming it
so it needs to be a rectangle.
And though anything else goes,
I'm going to use a couple of design elements
to pull it all together.
When you lay out your blocks,
is there one block that just goes,
ta-da, look at me, I'm the star of the show.
In this case, I do, it's a word
but it could be a fussy cut block,
it could be a panel,
it could just be a block
where the colours pop out from the rest.
Or maybe it's simply a favourite block.
You might have several of these or maybe none,
and you want to put this where you want to draw your eye.
Since this is a lap quilt,
I'm placing it about one-third down from the top.
If this was a quilt that was going on a bed,
I might put it a third up from the bottom.
I could have put it on a vertical
or I could have put it on a diagonal.
But I'm going to keep it simple today.
The next thing I'm looking at are similar blocks.
They don't need to be matchy matchy.
I have a group of four here.
They have a black trianglish portion
that gives a corner of the block a little bit of heaviness.
So I'm going to put them in the corners of my quilt
with the black part facing out.
Depending on the shape,
you may prefer to put these in the middle of the sides.
I call these capstone blocks.
I chose this method last year
when I made another improv quilt for our Guild.
You can use either, you can use both, you can use none.
Your choice.
But using capstones or cornerstones
gives your block some framing.
It basically tells the eye this is the sides
and get your eye back into the middle.
Another technique that I use a lot is mirroring.
Mirroring helps with balancing your quilt
if that's what you're looking for.
Since I have this big panel in the middle,
I'm going to use mirroring to help balance the two sides.
These are two blocks that are very similar.
Here, I'm flipping one.
This is improv
so I prefer that they are sisters, not twins.
Mirroring can be vertical,
it can be horizontal, it can be diagonal.
You will see I use this technique a lot
in a couple of different ways.
One reason why I am going with this method
is my blocks are all of different sizes
so I need a method to grow my blocks
so that I can piece them together.
I primarily use two methods.
The L Block where I add strips to the top and the side.
And the Courthouse Step Block
where I add pairs to the sides and the top.
I showed how to make both of these
in my video, Strip Scrap Blocks.
And I'll put a link to this video in the notes below.
So I go to my Mt. Scrapmore
and I pull out all my strips that are in blue.
And I use my donated blocks
as the centre and using these two methods,
I grow them with my strips.
Now it's always important
to keep checking against your original.
You do something, and you think it's going to be great,
but you see now I've got this
and I'm going to put it up like this.
Creates this kind of imbalance right here
which I don't really care for.
So, I'm actually going to change it up.
And I'm going to put it like this.
(soft upbeat music)
I could've made my strips intentionally wonky
but because there were strong parallel lines
in many of the blocks,
I've preferred to keep my strips straight.
Well, mostly straight.
And if I had some curves,
I possibly would've sewn some of the strips
together with curves,
but there's other simple methods you can use
to combine your blocks together too.
Stacks, that's just putting the block in the middle
and then strips along the side
and then stacking those strips on top of one another.
Economy blocks, that's taking the block,
you can even put it on point,
and you add half squared triangles to the side
and you can grow those out farther and farther.
And there's a wonky version.
And log cabins.
So this is just spiralling your strips
around the outside of a centre.
And there's a wonky version of this one too.
As I said, this is an organic process.
You make the decisions as you move along
based on what you have and what you feel like doing.
You can use all of the methods above
or you can use them one at a time
or you can combine them together.
And when nothing speaks to you
as it sometimes does,
just start sewing things together.
And trust me, you'll get some ideas
once that starts happening.
So with improv,
you do not need to plan your layout ahead of time
if you want to,
you can let it grow organically
as you piece the blocks together.
But eventually, as the blocks grow in size,
you're going to have to think about
how you're going to put it all together.
Here are some simple layouts.
Row by row or column by column.
These are both great layouts when you have blocks
that have a similar height or a similar width.
Doesn't mean all of them have
you just have enough to bunch together into a row.
Then there's the frame around the centre.
This is great when you have two distinct pile of blocks.
One set goes in the middle,
the other set goes in the perimeter around the outside.
Multiple rectangles.
This is great when you have several good focus blocks
and you want to scatter them around your quilt.
And log cabin.
Great method when you have a lot of small blocks
of a similar size
and then you can just make long chains and grow it.
It can work with either a focus block or not.
This time, since I do have a focus block,
and I do have four strong blocks
that I can use in the corners,
I'm going to use a hybrid of the row by row and the frame.
(soft upbeat music)
Three more points.
Squaring up.
I know I've mentioned this a thousand times
in my other videos,
but I'll mention it again here.
It is very important that your blocks lie flat.
Use a really good ironing technique
and if you're new here, I've got a whole video on it
and I'll put a link to it in the note.
And you square up after you join blocks together.
Don't be afraid to cut up blocks.
In my case, these are donated blocks
from other people who worked hard on them
so I wasn't going to destroy their work.
But I received several of the same type of blocks
which I used here
and I had some left over.
So I cut those up
and I turned them into pinwheels and broken dishes.
And this block was simply just too big
so I just trimmed it down the sides
and I put it front and centre here on the bottom.
And cull if it doesn't work.
I tried but these two blocks
just did not work in the middle.
And since they were the two blocks that I made,
I felt no problem leaving them out.
Now as you get towards the end,
you'll reach a moment
where you think it's just one hot mess.
But trust me, you go away for the day,
in my case I passed it onto two other Guild members,
one who long-armed, one who bound it,
and I must say, I'm feeling pretty proud that
I was able to be a part of this project.
What if my blocks had been the same size
or had a common fabric or theme?
Well, stay tuned for more videos in this series
on how to use up your orphan blocks.
There's so many of you that have eagle eyes
and you might be noticing
that I am wearing some new earrings.
They're my viewer's Mia.
She works for Ana Luisa
and she thought that I might need a little bit of change.
And she sent me these three sets of earrings.
They're made with noble metals.
I think they're pretty cool.
Anyways, she's giving a 10% discount
for anybody that wants to check out her website.
I'll put the link down in the notes below.
There are so many great things you can do with scraps
and I have prepared a playlist of other videos
that you can watch here.
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So take care and I'll see ya next time.