How To Use the Creative Grids Stripology XL Ruler

Published February 2026

Join Jen as she shows you how to use the Creative Grids Stripology® XL Ruler designed by Gudrun Erla. Jen demonstrates how this ruler saves time for cutting strips from your fabrics stash. Ruler slides easily over the fabric until pressure is applied. Exclusive grip holds the fabric in place while cutting, eliminating slipping and miss-cuts.

Cutting is one of the most time-consuming parts of quilting—especially when a project requires dozens of strips or repeated sub-cuts for squares. The Creative Grids® Stripology XL Ruler is designed to solve that exact problem by improving speed and accuracy while reducing measuring mistakes.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how the Stripology XL works, how to prep fabric for best results, and how to use its built-in markings to cut both strips and sub-cut units (like squares) efficiently.

In this video, you'll learn:

• How to fold width-of-fabric yardage so it fits under the ruler without cutting through a fold in the wrong place.
• How to read the ruler's star and square markings so you never do strip-width math again.
• Why the zero mark sits in from the edge, and how that gives you a clean first cut with almost no waste.
• How to sub-cut your strips into squares when the ruler's slots only run one direction.
• How many strips to cut before you shift the ruler — and what happens if you get greedy.

Check the links for everything you need.

Introduction

Stripology rulers come in several sizes — the XL, a smaller mini, and a square version. This walkthrough uses the XL, which gives the most cutting options and the most strips per placement before you have to move the ruler, but nearly everything here applies to the smaller ones as well. The ruler is currently Creative Grids' best-selling tool, and its packaging claims it cuts your cutting time by 75%.

Why Cut Your Own Precuts

Plenty of patterns are written around precuts, and the vocabulary is worth knowing before you start cutting your own.

• A jelly roll — Riley Blake calls theirs a Rolie Polie — is a set of 2.5″ strips cut the full width of fabric.
• A honey bun is Moda's 1.5″ strip bundle, lovely for smaller projects like cosmetic bags, and genuinely tedious to cut by hand when you need dozens of identical strips.
• A charm pack is a stack of 5″ squares.

The catch with any of them is that you're limited to whatever collections were bundled. If you've curated fabrics from your own stash, or you love a jelly-roll-friendly pattern but not the jelly rolls available in that colorway, cutting your own is the way out — and the Stripology exists precisely for that.

Before You Cut

The ruler removes the measuring, not the preparation.

1. Press your fabric flat, adding sizing first if that's your habit — the same prep you'd do before any cutting project.
2. Put a fresh blade in your rotary cutter. A dull or nicked blade skips, and with this ruler you're making many cuts in a row, so a bad blade turns a fast job into a miserable one. If you catch a pin at some point, change the blade rather than pushing through — going back to recut strips afterward gets messy.

Folding the Fabric to Fit

Quilting cotton runs roughly 43–44″ from selvage to selvage, which is wider than the ruler — so the fabric has to be folded before anything else happens.

1. Starting from fabric that's already folded once on the bolt, fold it in half again, bringing the fold up to meet the selvages.
2. Be deliberate about it: the fold and the selvages should run parallel, meeting cleanly at the top, with the fabric smoothed flat toward the bottom. An off-square fold here becomes crooked strips later, and no ruler can rescue that.
3. Lay the ruler down and use the bold black solid line to align. There's a marked line that sits right along the fold, so you can see exactly where you are rather than guessing.

One detail worth noticing: the ruler's zero mark isn't at its outer edge. That inset lets you bring the ruler right up close to the raw edge of your fabric, take a clean trimming cut, and start cutting strips immediately — with very little wasted fabric on that first pass.

Reading the Markings: No More Math

This is the part that makes the tool worth owning. Rather than measuring each strip, you follow a symbol.

1. Find the legend printed on the ruler. It maps two symbols to the two most common strip widths.
2. For 1.5″ strips (honey bun width), cut in every lane marked with a star.
3. For 2.5″ strips (jelly roll width), cut in every lane marked with a square.
4. That's the whole system. You're never adding 1.5 to 1.5 to 1.5 and losing your place — you just cut the stars, or cut the squares.

Those two widths are pre-marked because they're far and away the most popular. Other widths are still perfectly possible — a 3.5″ strip just means cutting at 3.5″, 7″, 10.5″, and so on — but you're back to doing that arithmetic yourself.

Cutting Your Strips

With the fabric folded and the ruler aligned, the cutting itself is repetitive in the best way.

1. Position the ruler toward the edge of your fabric so you waste as little as possible on the opening cut.
2. Make your first cut, then work through the slots, cutting in each lane that carries your chosen symbol.
3. Keep the blade running inside the slot rather than riding up on the ruler, and simply continue down the series.

Don't out-cut your ruler. It's tempting to keep going down the slots, but only cut as many strips as the ruler actually covers before repositioning. Cut past that and the last strip won't be supported when you shift — five or six at a time, then move the ruler, is the rhythm worth settling into.

Sub-Cutting Strips into Squares

Strips are only half of what this ruler does. Turning them into squares takes one adjustment, because the slots run in a single direction.

1. Shift your mat and fabric well to one side of your cutting table to give yourself room to work.
2. Cut your strips as usual, but leave them exactly where they are — lifting them up is what costs you accuracy.
3. Instead of turning the fabric, bring the ruler around to the side and line it up along the bottom edge of the strips.
4. Position so the selvage falls outside your cutting lanes, and it gets trimmed away as part of the process rather than needing a separate step.
5. Cut across, and your strips become squares.

You can also stack several fabrics before cutting and get multiples in one pass, which makes this an efficient way to work through scraps. And because the cuts come off the ruler's own slots, the results aren't approximately the size you wanted — a 2″ square is genuinely 2″, which is exactly what patchwork and fusible grid projects depend on. (A 2″ cut square finishes at 1.5″ once it's sewn.)

Cutting out a kit can be a chore when it's the same cut over and over — and that repetition is exactly what this ruler was built to absorb. The real payoff isn't only the speed; it's that every strip and every square comes off the same set of slots, so precision stops depending on how carefully you measured the twentieth one.

Explore the full range of Creative Grids rulers, make sure you have a sharp rotary cutter and replacement blades on hand, and browse any other notions you need to get started.

For personal use only, not for commercial production. No part of this pattern may be reproduced, shared, or distributed in any form unless given express written consent by Shabby Fabrics. Not to be used with any online classes or video tutorials other than the official Shabby Fabrics tutorial. All designs, photographs, and images are protected by federal copyright law. All rights reserved.