Scrap Box Block 2

I'm back today with a second tutorial for a block that will help you reduce your scrap boxes and make a funky, colourful quilt for a charity like Siblings Together.

The pic above shows two of the scrappy colour block rail fence blocks that this tutorial makes.  Again, no rocket science involved but it's all here for you if you fancy having a go.  This quilt was the inspiration for these blocks.  You need to have a wee peek just to see.

Anyway, while the inspiration quilt is all nice and regular sized pieces, I really wanted to crack into my store of scrappy strips of all widths and I imagine this would help a lot of you reduce your scrap mountains too!  So, for this block I worked in quadrants of single colour ways and strips of varying widths.  Go get yours and join me (and forgive for the terrible lighting in my tutorial pics).

Scrappy Colour Block Rail Fence Block

This will yield an unfinished block measuring 12.5" x 12.5" and uses scant 0.25" seams throughout.

You will need 6.5" lengths of scrappy strips in four different colour ways.

For each quadrant of your block take a number of 6.5" scraps in one colour and stitch them together along the longest side.  You will need enough strips so that your finished quadrant can be trimmed measure 6.5" square.  Just a tip: don't make the outer strips too narrow or you may lose them in your seam allowances.

Handy hint: This block will come together very quickly if you chain piece your strips in colour pairs.

Once your strips are pieced in each colour block, press the seams all in the same direction.

Then, trim each colour block to 6.5" square.

When you have all four 6.5" colour blocks made.  Lay them out as above, alternating the horizontal and vertical direction of the strips.

Stitch the top two quadrants together and then stitch the bottom two together and press the joining seams in opposite directions.

Pin the top row and bottom row together, nesting the seams that you pressed in opposite directions neatly.  Stitch together and press your centre seam open.

Now that you have all four colour block quadrants together all that remains is to trim the block to 12.5" square before you start on a second one! ;-)

Remember, this little tutorial is just to show you how easy it would be to make a fun quilt from your scraps for a very worthy cause.

My first scrap box block can be found here if you are interested.  As always, I am very happy for anyone to reference these scrap box block tutorials or indeed any of my block tutorials for use in your Charity Bees or even just your ordinary Bee groups.

There will be another block along soon, so keep reading!
Block 3 is now published here.