Fabric Weaving for Quilters

Today, we're gonna be looking a little bit at fabric weave. It's a great way for Twos embellishments, to really open up your lines of creativity in the quilting community. Now, I'm going to show you how to create something that looks like this. And we're gonna be using 2/3 quarters, which is what's really nice about this technique it is you don't have to use large amounts of fabric. You actually can use smaller amounts of fabric and then you can start piecing them together. And it gives just an extraordinary appearance. I'm gonna set this aside for a moment and we're gonna talk a little bit about what we need to put on the back of this. You need something that's going to help to hold it in place. And what I've chosen is Stimoson. Stimoson is a wonderful product that helped us to... It's got a little bit of stickiness on one side and on the other side, it's gonna be sticky as well once we pull the paper away. So all we're gonna do is we're going to iron that on to this fabric. And it stays pretty easily because there is that adhesive. It doesn't feel very heavy either. It's a little bit of a lightness to it actually. So it's a nice product to work with. One of the best things I like about it is you peel this paper away. And your product stays behind. And it allows you to remove the pieces. So if it's not exactly where you want it you can move it to another spot. We did just touch it a little bit more in those center areas. This is one of those things that's better to try to peel off while it's still warm, because it tends to stay off a little bit better. If you let it cool at all, it wants to just hang on to the paper. But what we're using it for, this is going to work fine. I always try to keep a piece. I use the piece to turn it over for the cutting because I do not want that to stick to my cutting mat. So again, I've already placed it on this and I'm just going to line them both up side by side. Now, if you want, you can cut it by putting one, one way and one the other way. But I'm for this project. I am just going to have them side by side. I'm gonna move it up just because my cutting boards a little small today. Now you can cut straight lines or you can cut wavy lines or you can cut both totally up to you. And with my project, I am gonna cut some wavy lines And you do this through the entire piece of fabric. And because you're cutting wavy line, for some reason that doesn't always wanna cut all the way through. And it's because of the way that your blade tilts as you're doing the curve. You can cut them thin, you can cut them thick. It doesn't really matter whatever you choose to do. I'm gonna cut them a little bit thicker towards the center area. And you see, I'm not going all the way to the top. You can, if you like. But I'm just gonna be demoing it for you. So, I'm not going all the way to the top with these. One thing you could do if you had a cutting board that's large enough is that you could tape it down. And if you taped it down that would help with the movement of the fabric. So now I've got them all cut to where I want them and I'm gonna be taking all of these papers off because we no longer want these papers on. We want this fabric to stick to itself to one another, because it's sticky on both sides on the back of this and on the back of this fabric. By not cutting to all the way to the top you see how easy it is to pull this off. It's very easy. Move this to the side a little bit. Put that down. I'm just gonna put this down on the floor and we're gonna do a little bit of fabric weave. I'm not too worried when there's this little area that doesn't... You can sometimes just rip it. Or if you have a scissors, you can also just do a little clip. It's not a big deal, because most likely it'll be a part that might be under fabric because we truly are weaving it. And any errors that you have, look at them as opportunities. They're not mistakes. They're creative opportunities to learn something new, to try something new, something nobody else has done. So once you get all of these cutaway, you're gonna start going every other role. So I'm going to lift up this row and I'm gonna lift up this row, and this row, Keeping these down in this role and this role. Now I'm going to start weaving by utilizing this. So I'll put this down first and I'm gonna be cutting this down. So I'm not too worried about it and how it's going to be looking on the outside. I'm gonna be cutting it down to probably an eight by eight block. You see how I'm just weaving it, I'm just laying it back down right on top of itself. It's such a fun and simple project to do. And I think I'm gonna just go a little bit farther on this. And we can just leave all of these lane open because they're gonna come one by one through. They wanna stick to the table, which is nice. Now, the next row you're gonna do just the opposite. Wherever that last piece went up, we're gonna be lifting. And now the next row is going to come and do the same thing. And as we put that piece down we wanna make sure that it's snug. We wanna make sure that we've got that piece. It's nice and snug in there. Butts up to the other piece, as best as we can. And I'm pressing down on that steam seam. So it's keeping it in place. These make really great table runners as well. So now this time, I'm just gonna cut this a little bit more this way. And then this is the last row that we'll do. Then we'll talk more about because I think you'll get the main idea of how to do it. another way to do this is to press each row as you go. Always make sure you're using the right side as well. You'd hate to put the stabilizer on the wrong side and then ruin that piece of fabric. Because once that stabilizer is on that fabric you're not gonna be able to get it off. If you have... And I'm actually going to leave purposely a little opening there, just so you can see this little opening that you could see through and see the table. If you find a situation like that, it's not a big deal. What you can do is you can take and you can put underneath it another piece of fabric because this already has a sticky adhesive to it. So you can add it right to another piece of fabric, can be a similar fabric or a different fabric altogether, just to give it a few little specks of confetti per se. So let me get that back up there now. This is the idea behind fabric weave. It's not as difficult as it looks or as people tell you it is. It's just is time consuming. Something that I'd like to do is if I'm gonna be doing a large project and finishing the complete project I'm always going to put a piece of tape to hold that in place as I try to adjust it. So it doesn't move at all. So I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna put it aside and we're gonna talk about the finished piece that I have here and what we can do with that. The finished piece that I have here that I've already worked on, I thought it was a nice Christmas piece. So I have this great piece of fabric that had put sensors on it. And I thought, boy, I could make that into a really nice little wall hanging or even just into a block that will end up being in the center of a quilt. I could put it on point or I can just cut it in a rectangle. I can maybe do a couple squares. There's so much that I can use this for. So I decided that I would take the steam of steam and I would put it on the back of this fabric. And then I took, and I cut out all these individual little pieces because I thought they make nice a little decorative in lays on that fabric. Because it's got this team of team on the back, I can take off the steam of seam and I can just it on the mat. Now, the nice thing is that I don't have to immediately press it. I can intertwine them and interlock them. So they overlap in a very nice way. Here was a piece that I took that I really liked that because it was kind of, the leafs were there and they were a parent. I didn't want to waste them. So it actually was the edge of the fabric. And here you can just tuck this right under and it starts giving it dimension as you layer. And I'll continue to do that. And then when I finally have it where I want it where I feel that it's good I'm going to want to press it, to keep it in place. And I may want to keep adding to it. See how pretty that is. Or I might want to take it and have it kind of follow a theme through. There's so many things that you can do with that. So that's one option. Now there's another option that I've done. I thought I wanted something very simple. So I started in with my weave and I decided that I had a stencil and that's a dense I generally use it for painting. And sometimes for quilting. This time what I did was I laid it on a piece of fabric and I drew around it. I also put the steam of seam light behind that fabric. So I was able to put it down on this. See, I can take it off if I desire to take it off and then I can reposition it when I want to reposition it. And now what I could do is I could add maybe some apples that have fallen off the tree or I could add leaves and have a very pretty leaf scene there. This is a piece that I've been working on and it's been a little bit difficult. I keep changing it up. So everything is still being picked up and moved. But this is the nice thing about it. You're never stuck in stone. You are always able to change it up just a little bit. With this piece, I actually was able to paint. I used a highlighter on this fish and we put some gems which is also kind of a fun way to embellish. This is just yarn with some ribbon that I found that have leaves on them but you can make a very nice scene with it. So I hope that you've enjoyed this enjoyed the segment in that perhaps you'll have a little bit of fun playing around and creating on your own with a little bit of fabric weave.