Exploring the Basics: Strip Piecing

Rotary cutting revolutionized quilting, making it super quick and easy to accurately cut strips and shapes for quilting.  It is no surprise that strip piecing, the process of sewing strips of fabric together and then cutting apart in determined sizes, quickly followed.

Let's look at some basic strip piecing.  Often, but not always, strip piecing is done with complete, or full strips of fabric cut from the width of the fabric (selvedge edge to selvedge edge, generally considered to be 40" of usable fabric). 

Keep in mind as we go through the examples that the number of strips in a strip set may vary depending upon the block.

Rail Fence - 3 Rails

Rail fence blocks and quilts can be formed from two fabrics in a strip set up to...well, as many as you want.

Here is a simple rail fence strip set - pink, lime, pink.  

Once the strip set (the two lime strips and the single pink strip) are sewn together AND pressed, they are ready for sub-cutting - the process of cutting into smaller units.

Rail Fence Blocks

In the example above, the strip shown is being cut into 5 separate rail fence units.

 

You can put four rail fence units together and make a rail fence block.  Above is just one variation of a three rail unit. So what would that look like in a quilt?

Rail Fence Quilts

Here is a simple layout - the rail fence block from above, repeated 20 times.  But wait - one of the fun aspects of rail fence blocks is their versatility!

Here is the same layout, but with half of the blocks flipped.  Fun, right?

Here is another rail fence layout.  Notice that this time the rail fence units have four rows of piecing.  Simply rotating the blocks 90 degrees each time creates a fun zig zag pattern.  Ah....your creative juices are flowing now, aren't they?  You are seeing the possibilities.

And keep in mind that the rails (the strips, the rows) don't have to be the same size.  Look at how using different size strips in your rail fence can add some extra interest in the quilt above!

Other Strip Pieced Blocks

Let's look at a block and determine what the strip sets would be to make the block.  

The uneven 9 patch block above can be made from two different strip sets - a narrow red, wide yellow, narrow red set and a narrow yellow, wide red, narrow yellow strip set.

Many blocks can be fully or partially constructed using strip piecing!  This speeds up the piecing, which means the blocks are finished faster and the quilt can be put together that much quicker.

Here's another example for you - the Money Wrench block.  Let's break it apart to see what we can strip piece.

Look at the piecing for this monkey wrench block.  When we break the block apart, we can see that the block is made up of HSTs (half square triangles - see more on making HSTs in this blog post), two different strip pieced units (lime/yellow and pink/yellow), and a solid pink square.  

Using strip piecing to make the lime/yellow and pink/yellow units is faster and when rotary cut, are more accurate.

These are just a few examples of how you can use strip piecing.  Kate and I will be exploring more strip piecing when we look at four patch blocks and nine patch blocks in future posts!

Head over to Kate's blog to get some additional tips and ideas on strip piecing.

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