First quilt, absolute mess. Skewed squares.
 

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.

http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/d...psgdy9559l.jpg

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.

http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/d...psmmmi0agp.jpg

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?

So, you're mixing minky fleece and cotton blocks for your quilt?

Not an impossible task, but you would probably have better luck using a walking foot on your regular sewing machine. A walking foot would help to feed both layers together. Before you reassemble your entire quilt top, you may want to play with a few scraps using the walking foot to see if it feeds better with the cotton fabric on the top or the bottom. I don't use minky a lot because all of that fuzz makes me crazy, so I'm not sure which fabric will feed better on the top.

welcome to the board!

You say your an intermediate sewer... ah but grasshopper... quilting is different. Quilters sew with 1/4" seam, sewers 1/2" or 5/8". Quilter use smaller pieces, the smaller the piece the MORE accurate you need to be with that 1/4" seam.

Also I see you have minkie fabric with you cottons. Minkie stretches more than cotton.

I can understand why you want to use the serger, minkie ravels. BUT if you have to un-sew, it is a pain in the A$$.

good luck

Yup! I'm insane, I know!

I considered that solution, but the "cush" of that fabric makes it so shifty that I can't even pick it up without it moving right across and becoming misaligned again. It's hard to explain, but knowing my machines and my operation, it wouldn't be a great fix. Also, the columns are already pieced and they are not coming back apart! Essentially, I gave up and just tried to match the other squares as best as I could and write those off.

The main thing I'm looking at right now is the best way to trim the edges to make them flush again. Then, I can only assume that I'll make sure all of the seams are pressed flat and try to match them up when I sew the columns together, and use an insane amount of pins to hold each seam to the one it's supposed to be aligned with.

Welcome from Texas. I've never sewn with minky, but I've heard it helps to have a stabilizer on the backside to make it more manageable.

The only way I have seen Minky mixed with cotton in quilt tops is as an applique. One lady in our Linus group pieces cotton quilts and then to add texture, she appliques Minky, fleece, and other textured non-cotton fabric circles positioned here and there on the top. In your case, since matching seams might be a problem, the appliques could be placed right over a bad seam match and nobody would be the wiser. It is true that the little children love the textures on their quilts!

To be honest with you, I'm not sure how you'll be able to trim the edges accurately. Because the squares are coming together wonky, your rows aren't straight. When you take a straight edge to trim the overhang, how will you make sure that you aren't actually cutting at an angle? That would mess you up terribly when you go to attach rows. I don't know how you will be able to prevent that since the rows aren't squared up. If you did somehow find a way to trim them accurately, you would need to trim all of the rows, otherwise some of your rows will be made up of smaller squares than others. I hope that made sense.

That said, welcome to the board! I truly hope that you find a good solution. Once you have the top pieced together, quilting and washing will hide a multitude of sins. :P

Can you add sashing in between the columns so that you won't have to really match seams? If you maybe do 1in sashes in between (cutting 1.5in) then after quilting, it shouldn't be noticeable. Normally, I'd do all flannel or all cotton on the front and save the minky for the backing since as you've found, it stretches and frays so much! Adorable fox print, though!

I have not used minky yet and I may in the near future. I also heard or read you may need to stabilize the minky to make it not stretch so much. Please show us when you are done. You could applique a minky fox on the front.

The only way I can figure is to line the seams up with the lines of my cutting mat to ensure that they are lying straight, then allowing me to cut a better edge. It can never be perfect at this point, but it's far too off right now to even get a semblance of a matching line.