Thank you all for your opinions. I usually pin (and baste) where intersections are and for longer seams, but I skip this step for shorter seams. Right now I'm sewing 2 3" squares together. Whereas before I would just stitch these together, this time I've decided to take the extra time to pin. Hopefully this will work to make things a little less wonky for me. If I were to sew two long strips together of the exact same length without pins, by the end of the strip I would have an overhang of a half inch or so on one strip. I'm not sure if it's just my sewing machine that does this or if they all do, or if it's something I'm doing to make it happen. So for the long ones I definitely need to pin.