Originally Posted by omak
I just went back and looked at your beginning picture again, and I just can't figure out what there was that made this ugly to you.
SO, I am looking at the pattern, and I am seeing a nine patch, some four patches, and then white bar ... and, I am thinking:
Was it the construction instructions that got you all flustered?
I had a chance once to help someone make a quilt with a pattern from 1976 ... I didn't work with it about fifteen minutes and thought:
Lord! If this had been my first introduction to quilting, I would NEVER have bothered!
Today, I am still appalled by some of the "old" instructions people use to confound the beginner ... I get the template and all of the hardest way .. but, whatever did anyone do to deserve being punished like that? <g>
Anyway, if you made this quilt again, Eddy, would you construct it the same way that the instructions led you to in the first place?
Could the construction have created your mindset?
I think it was a combination of the construction which wasn't going well (points not matching) and the style of a lot of the fabric. I like some of the fabric, but a lot of it just looked weird to me after working with it for a while. I think if I had picked a different fabric, I could have toughed out the wonky points.
The method I used from the book was strip piecing, where the jelly roll strips are sewn together as a 5 strip unit. Those 5 strip units are then cut into smaller strips and these smaller strips are then sewn together to form the blocks. I think a lot of my problem was with the jelly roll strips themselves and their pinked edges (which I really don't like). For some reason, the Moda strips and and layer cakes I've worked with are measured to the center point of the pinking, meaning that the true "edge" of the piece falls between the valley and peak of the pinking. That's a very minute thing, but it makes a difference over several seams. So I think that was throwing me off.