Every weekday, I spend about 2-3 hours sewing first thing in the morning. Usually, I pick up where I left off the day before and ease myself into the day with some familiar routine stitching. Earlier this week, on Monday, I started off the day, and the week with all 12 of the blocks sewn and ready to assemble into the scrappy Chopped quilt I've been working on for the past few weeks. This project was on my stash shelf waiting for a long time for a finish.
My first task of the day, early Monday morning, was to cut some border and sashing strips. I cut and pre-washed a gob of fabric so I could cut the sashing and border strips along the lengthwise grain for stability and fewer seams.
I started off on the wrong foot when I cut the first strip selvage to selvage. Therefore the longest two borders needed to be pieced to get to the correct length. I refolded the fabric so my next cuts would truly follow the lengthwise grain. And I managed to pull off that cutting the other two outer borders without incident.
Finally, I needed three 4" strips for the sashing. I guess I got hung up on the number three and, instead, cut three 3" strips, and I was so pleased with myself that I had just enough fabric left to make all three cuts, even after the earlier cutting mishap.
Then I picked up the pattern, realized my mistake, and uttered some choice, not-so-polite phrases.
Avoiding panic but with annoyance setting in, I decided I had options. I could put the 3" strips aside for some future project (which in my heart of hearts, I knew those strips would just sit and gather dust). Or I could sew the strips together to make one big fat lengthwise grain strip and re-cut.
Without doing any math, and wanting to make this issue just GO AWAY. I sewed the strips together. Did you know that three 3" strips sewn together become two 4" strips, exactly?
The last of the three strips needed, I pieced together from leftovers, using diagonal seams.
So. . .three strips that were supposed to be long enough to have ZERO seams, each had at least one long seam or two short seams.
"Why not just adjust the size of the quilt and run with the 3" strips?," you might ask. And this is a good question! The pattern is called 'Chopped' because you make pinwheel, blocks then chop off the edges. Those chopped-off pieced become the pieced border.
The pieced border is a specific size, so making adjustments in the quilt center gets all kinds of crazy as the rest of the quilt is constructed.
The Chopped quilt is still in pieces, laid out on the studio floor in ready-to-sew piles. With the all the cutting errors adding up, I decided maybe the quilt was telling me it needed a little break. On Tuesday, I decided to do some quilting on a baby quilt to let Chopped rest.
Note to self. When working on your to-do list, try to avoid the to-don'ts
Happy Stitching!
Head Hummingbird
Hummingbird-Highway.com
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