McGargantuette

I’m needing a push in one direction or another. I’m working on a quilt top made up of HSTs and squares. This is my first time using HSTs, and only my second quilt. I read through and watched several tutorials explaining how to do HSTs with matching corners, avoiding buried and floating points, etc. And I’ve been doing my best to be as accurate as possible in cutting, pressing, squaring, and sewing the top. Until yesterday, it was “so far so good” – all the blocks were made and all the horizontal rows were sewn together, with just a couple of points slightly buried, and a couple of corners slightly off, but nothing that the perfectionist in me couldn’t live with.

But yesterday I started putting my 8 finished rows together vertically. I used all the information I’d used up to that point to try to get the points and seams to line up. So far I’ve sewn 3 of the 8 rows together, but try as I might, I’m finding it impossible to get them all to line up. The mismatched areas are off by up to 1/8th of an inch. A fair number of them are exact matches, or close enough. But there are also a fair number of those larger mismatches, and they are bugging me.

I’m now wondering whether I should rip them apart and try again. I wouldn’t really mind doing that, but I have no reason to believe that my next attempts would be any more successful than the first ones, since I’ve done everything I can think of to pin them together and sew them properly to get the points and corners to line up, but without success. Or maybe I should just accept my limitations as a new quilter and keep moving forward.

What would you do?