bkay

I'm a beginning quilter, so I may be stating the obvious. My first quilt was a mess. It was a disappearing 9 patch. The cutting was off, the seams were off and nothing matched. So, I hid the worst of it with a new arrangement. Then, I went on a hunting expedition on how to get my seams to match (+ I cut more accurately).

When I'm trying to match seams, I pin the spot where it has to match, right though the seam, top and bottom and pin on both sides as described above. Once you do that, you can usually see if one side is larger/longer than the other. (That's generally the reason seams don't match.) I put the long side on the bottom and kind of stretch the short (top) side as I sew. I've even switched back and forth between sewing the top and bottom several times on a long seam. (They say the feed dogs will pull the bottom faster than the top, so always put the long side on the bottom.) I also check the seams and if they don't match, I just redo that seam by ripping out about an inch on each side and repeating the above process.

There are several tutorials about how to take up the slack in the wrong place. Some are on youtube and some are just web pages. It's really helped me a lot on getting my seams to match.

bkay