TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT

The scrap quilt of 2" squares, set 8 by 8, is completely finished.  At the meeting of the country quilters on Thursday I sewed on the binding.  That was a really close call.

When I cut the binding, I wanted to use 3" width, sewn on the back, turned over to the front and machine stitched down on the front.  I had just enough material to cut that out.  When the binding was cut, there was a wisp of fabric left.

After I sewed the binding to the quilt, I cut it on the 45 degree angle to make a bias seam closing on it.  OOOOPS!!! I cut the bottom strip the wrong way.  Now it was too short to sew together.  But I had about 2 inches of binding left.  I trimmed the edges straight and sewed the small piece onto one side.  It didn't overlap the other side!  I took out the seam and made it a scant 1/4" inch.  Now there was room to join the two ends of binding with another scant 1/4" inch.

It worked, and the fact that the binding has a small insert about 1 1/2" really doesn't show because the material is so dark.  ALL DONE!

The Pinwheel quilt is coming along.  All 127 blocks are finished, and two horizontal rows have been sewed together.  That's going well.

But the next project was knocking on the door: a Disappearing 4 Patch.  I had made about eight blocks when I saw this pattern on a blog.  I thought it would make a good lap quilt.  I got out some whites and brights and started. Then I encountered the first, big problem.  If you press all the seams to the dark fabric you will have several seams that won't "nest."

One of the women at the country quilters had just finished a lap quilt in this pattern.  She pressed all the seams open.  So today I was trying that.  That's a "no go" for me.  It's just too hard to make the points meet properly.  Monica had said she made it work by doing lots and lots of pinning.  That just didn't want to work for me.  So I fiddled around with different ways of pressing the seams.  Here are a few examples, including the block with the seams pressed open.

None of these produced a solution for sewing the blocks together.  There would always be seams pressed in the same direction, so you'd end up with six layers of fabric in one place.  NO GOOD!

So here's what I'm trying now.  The top two rows have gaps in the blocks where the seams are going to be.  These blocks do not have the final two vertical seams and the final two horizontal seams sewn.  The plan is to press the first lefthand block one way, then press the second block in that row to nest into the first block.  Sew them together.  Press the third block to nest with the second, etc.  

It's a little too late for me to start on that now.  I need to be brighter than I am right now. It will have to wait until Monday.  OOOH THE SUSPENSE!

Tomorrow the town quilters are going together to the Red Deer Quilt Show.  That's always a good large show, nothing like the one at Heritage Park in Calgary, but plenty to look at for one day.  There are lots of vendors with all sorts of enticing patterns, fabrics and accessories.  Dangerous territory for the bunch of us!  But always interesting to see who goes home with what.