How to Inset Skinny Strips
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It has been a little while since I last posted a tutorial, so I may be a little rusty.
While I was honing the technique of insetting skinny strips I tried a number of ways, some more successful than others. Below I set out my preferred method.
What you will need:
Background fabric - decide the size you would like. For the purpose of this tutorial, I used a square measuring 16" x 16".
Skinny strips measuring 1" wide.
A standard foot for your sewing machine
A zipper foot
Fabric glue
A seam ripper
I will describe below how I made the block shown above. Feel free to modify the size of the background fabric and the placement of your skinny strips.
Press the background fabric and use starch if desired.
Cut the fabric down the middle.
Having sliced the fabric of course you're now going to sew it back together. Fold the fabric with right sides together and using a 1/4" seam allowance and a long tacking stitch sew the halves together. I used white thread for the purpose of this tutorial, so use a matching thread for your block if you prefer. It may help to use a different colour for the tacking stitches.
Press the seam flat then open the seam and press. If you have a wooden clapper, use it to achieve a flatter seam.
With some fabric glue place dots of glue on each side of the seam. Make sure you don't glue near the middle of the seam as it may show on the right side, which you don't want .
Place the first skinny strip on the seam so that the centre of the strip matches the centre of the seam. Press to set the glue.
Change to a zipper foot. Your stitches need to be as far over to the left-hand side as possible, just to the right of the tacking stitches, with a stitch length of 2.4 or less.
Fold the block so that the skinny strip is facing down and you can see the tacking stitches. Stitch down the length of the block.
You now need to stitch down the other side, so turn the block over, again with the skinny strip facing down. You should be able to see the reverse side of the tacking stitches. Stitch down the length of the block. Check that the two rows of permanent sitches aren't touching. There needs to be a narrow gap between the two rows.
With a seam ripper remove the tacking stitches.
Turn the block so that the right side is facing upwards and gently tease open the gap.
Press the block. Trim the excess fabric as shown in the photo below. I trimmed the fabric after I had inset three skinny strips.
For this block there are three vertical strips in different colours. I then incorporated two horizontal strips.
When adding horizontal strips you need to line up the seams with the vertical strips in order to get the horizontal strips to be straight.
If you are wanting to add strips at an angle, eg 45 degrees, it has the effect of staggering the existing strips, as shown in the photographs below.
I hope you've found this tutorial useful. Let me know how you get on, either by leaving a comment below or on my Instagram or Facebook pages.
Here's an example of a block I made using just two colours.
