Originally Posted by
Kim Bohannon
the quilt looks great to me... but as for squaring up your blocks, usually, you do have to take more off one side than the others... that is normal.. what is important is that your seams all come to the same place on the ruler... Hope that helps
Ahhh...and this is where my concern comes in for future quilts. I know that in some way those vertical seams are important in this. I lined up each block so that the diagonal line on the ruler went through the corners of the block - but I did not line up on any seam. Had I not been attaching the 9-patches to Snowball blocks (that did not have seams to meet up) - I think I would have run into a problem with seams not lining up.
So if you take off more on one side than another - doesn't that make the block pattern look off? Disproportionate? I am very visual, so having trouble "seeing" this. I should probably get some scrap fabric and throw together a handful of 9 patch blocks - making my seams deliberately a little bit off on a few - then practice squaring them - paying attention to one of the vertical seams. Sometimes I have to see it done wrong before I get it - and I would prefer for that to happen on practice blocks, not a quilt!
Lab Fairy - yes, that's a thought - I could make the HST bigger if I wanted the end of the triangles to line up with a seam on the 9-patches. I was actually relieved to see that the particular points I was looking at weren't necessarily supposed to line up. So it makes sense that in order to make those points lines up - the size would need to increase.
MadQuilter - yes, I actually did mark all of my squares on the diagonal. I am sure not all was perfect though. Especially with the sewing, though I did get better faster after working through 124 of them! I learned what I was looking for as to where to start sewing on the corners on my machine - very valuable to get that, made sewing the later triangles easier than it seemed on the first batch.