lining up

 

my last bits of liberty arrived, and while nice, were not what i was fully hoping. but i switched out one print for the pink and brown print i wanted to remove; then got on with finishing the blocks and assembling a quilt top.

i added the grungy crossweave as sashing and am happy with the look. i was thinking as i put the short pieces on the sides of blocks for the vertical sashing that it's so nice how sashing makes it so you don't have to worry about seam matching as you do when the blocks join each other directly.

then, as i began joining up rows with the horizontal sashing in between, i thought how cornerstones are a really good idea for getting the sashing to line up. i was thinking this because i wasn't using any and immediately had issues with the vertical pieces matching up across the horizontal pieces even though i pinned right from the start this time. ugh. i thought they were lining up and everything was going well. but when i pulled the first pair off and opened it up, things did not look good. the photo actually looks pretty good, but it got worse from there the further down the line i went.

i was a bit stumped. i thought i was getting them lined up as i pinned them. i was feeling the seams further away from the sashing where the block and sashing joined together, which felt lined up. but they weren't.

i don't think louise (my quilt mother) every taught me how to line up pieces that have sashing in between. and i haven't seen anyone else talk about it, either. so i had to come up with an idea myself.

this time i marked the horizontal sashing piece with where the vertical piece already attached to it was. i made small pencil marks where the seams were at the outer edge of the sashing that would be sewn to the other blocks. i lined the edge of the ruler up with the seam between block and vertical sashing, then marked down the line from it on the horizontal outer edge. it was the right side of the fabric, so i kept it under a 1/4" where it would be included in the seam allowance and not show.

the pencil marks blended in with the crossweave fabric, but i could see them well enough in person.

then i laid the next row on top, right sides together, lined up the vertical sashing ends with the pencil marks, and pinned at each seam. it worked! whew. i was happy to have that figured out. 

backing up a bit - i did a good job laying out all the blocks in a pattern and sticking with it as i sewed them into rows. i've seen other quilters have a system for stacking the blocks and ways to mark them, but that never works for me. the only (nearly) failproof system for me is to take a photo of the blocks in the order i want; then set the photo up in front of me when i'm sewing and consult it constantly as i sew the blocks together. constantly, as in, for each and every seam i'm sewing i check and double check i have the correct blocks going together and turned the correct direction.

and somehow i still manage to turn one or two overall. but its so much better than when i don't do this!

when putting this top together, i laid out the blocks in rows. first i sewed the short, vertical sashing pieces to the blocks, then sewed the blocks with sashing into a row. next, rows were joined into pairs with the long, horizontal piece of sashing between them.

the above photo is the blocks for one row with the short sashing attached, ready to be sewn into a row. i keep them on my lap and consult that photo propped up in front of me constantly. i put the sashing on two blocks in the first row on the wrong side, so had to unpick those, and put one or two other blocks together the wrong way, and had to unpick that. but for me, this was doing really good!

the lining-up of the short sashing across the long pieces between rows was giving me a bit of a headache, so i had to break out the chocolate for a pick-me-up. it reminded me of a small instagram trend a few friends and i had going once apon a time where we used the hashtag #chocolateonquilts. i'm not sure why it was "on quilts" instead of "and quilts," which makes more sense, but i'm not the one who started it. i just remember we would occasionally share a chocolatey treat photographed with a quilt and mark it with that hashtag. in the good old days before ig ruined hashtags.