Hello!
I'm an intermediate sewer that has always been fascinated by quilts. Having a baby niece join the family made for the perfect excuse to finally make one! She is having her first birthday in a few weeks, and so I started gathering fabric a few weeks ago to begin.
Her absolute favorite song, even as a tiny baby, was "What Does the Fox Say?" and I found two adorable nursery prints with foxes on them. It was meant to be! After choosing the fabrics and cutting my squares as carefully as possible, I found a few pictures online of patchwork patterns and started to lay everything out.
This was my first frustration. I could not find a way to follow any sort of pattern and not have the two fox prints touching in at least some areas. I eventually gave up. Hopefully it doesn't look too bad?
I decided to piece the quilt top with my serger, as I love my serger and I find it so much easier and quicker to use than my sewing machine. It wasn't far into piecing that I began to realize that my blocks weren't lining up the way they needed to. I expected this somewhat, but not to this extent.
After letting it raise my blood pressure a little, I just shrugged it off and figured that I can try to ask for help on how to fix this. You can see that the one knit fabric is the main one giving me fits, but I simply must have it in the quilt. It is her favorite texture.
Now that I have the columns pieced, I laid everything back out just to see how it started to match up. The columns aren't pressed yet, but I can already see some discrepancies.
I want to minimize the skewing as much as possible. I assume that first, I have to take the columns and shave the edges off to get those straight? I used a rotary cutter and mat/ruler to do the blocks, which looked awesome, but you see how well that worked out.
I just know that if it's a little off when I start, by the time I get to the end, a few millimeters off will turn into half an inch in some areas.
Argh! What can I do?