A French braid quilt block is thirteen rectangles and one small square. Christen of I See Stars Quilting stops on the square, because it is the only piece in the block whose job is to save fabric rather than fill space.
She arrives at this block from the scrap closet. The week before this tutorial she had cut her leftovers down into two and a half inch strips of her own making, and the braid is what she did with them. It reads as woven, and there is not a Y seam anywhere in it.
The cutting list is two lines long: two and a half inch squares, and rectangles two and a half by six. Both are jelly roll width, so a precut strip works exactly as well as a scrap. She lays the whole braid out before sewing anything, alternating left and right so no fabric lands beside itself, then works from two separate piles to keep that order at the machine. The square sits at the bottom and starts the climb, and that is where the fabric is saved: begin with a rectangle instead and the whole first join ends up below the trim line. She presses with an iron between every piece rather than finger pressing, and says the accuracy is visibly better for it.
The tutorial has been up since 2022 and has passed a hundred thousand views.
Worth watching even if you have braided before, because most of the fourteen minutes is the part that never gets written down. Where the peaks have to meet as you go. Which pile the next piece comes from. And, at the end, where to put the ruler, since what is on the table is a strip rather than a block until you decide. She lines the starting square up at three and a quarter inches, trims both sides, squares the bottom, and finishes at fifteen by six.
If it leaves you wanting to go at your own scrap bin the way she went at hers, our guide to scrap quilt patterns covers sorting what you already own, the five ways to hold a scrappy quilt together, and the blocks and settings that suit leftovers.
The channel is ISeeStarsQuilting, where Christen posts weekly modern quilting tutorials.
