If it's not broke, don't fix it! One Block Wonder - lessons learned

Where to begin?

I guess, we should start with the piecing.  The One Block Wonder pattern is 6 triangles pieced together to form those hexagon shapes.  Actually, you piece 3 together, form long, long, long rows then sew the rows together.  The result is that you have some bias edges, but more problematic is that you have very bulky seams in places.

I pieced this one together a really long time ago, but I pressed my seams open.  Perhaps I could have clipped them a little differently to reduce some of the bulk, but I am not sure it would make a huge difference.  I didn't even notice the bulkiness until I started quilting.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me stop and also talk about basting.

In January, I took Cindy Needham's Craftsy class AND her Ready Set Go Quilt! class at the Road to California quilt show.  In both classes, she teaches her basting method.  So of course, I wanted to try it out!  She teaches you how to "tension" the backing of your quilt and hold it in place (clips) while you spread your batting and top out on top, then you pin baste.

Normally, I spread out by backing, smooth it nicely, clip it to the table, add the batting, smooth it, clip it to the table too, lay out my top, smooth it, clip it to the table too.  I make sure all the layers are smooth, but I don't "tension" or stretch any of them.  But, I view Cindy as a guru of sorts, and I noticed in Leah Day's (another person of guru status around here) Craftsy class that she really tensions her backings tightly onto the table too.

I followed Cindy's instructions, and I am confident that I did it correctly.  I didn't stretch the backing TOO much, but it was nice and tight.  I laid my batting down, smoothed it and then the top and went about pinning and smoothing as I went, just as Cindy teaches.  When I took it off the table, it looked fine.  No creases, no pleats, nothing out of the ordinary.  BUT, when I started quilting it there was a noticeable difference in the amount of fabric that I was dealing with on the top of the quilt.  Meaning, my top was not smooth any longer but had slightly more fabric.  Hard to explain.  It wasn't wrinkled, it was just "loose".

Luckily, I choose to just do a simple all over stipple for the middle of my quilt.  That quilting pattern is pretty forgiving if you have some extra fabric that you are moving around because your quilting lines don't touch.  Usually by "tensioning" your hands (spreading the fabric out with your hands) and wiggling around with the stipple, the excess fabric just gets rationed out into the quilting design and you don't notice it.  Where that extra fabric really began to give me trouble was in the borders.

Pleat city!  Yes, small pleats, but pleats!  That rope quilting design was much less forgiving than the stipple,  because the lines intersect.  I really had a lot of extra fabric to deal with.  When I say "a lot", I guess I am exaggerating a bit, I didn't have a ball of fabric or anything, but the top and batting were just so much looser than the backing that yeah, it squished it up a bit.  I tensioned my hands like crazy, but it was going to help me when my quilting lines started to connect with one another.  There just wasn't enough room to ration out that excess fabric as the lines started to near each other.  Result = small pleats.  Hopefully, these will blend in after washing.

Now back to those bulky seams...they are hard to quilt around and through.  But that is what I tried to do.  Where possible, I tried to make my stipple line go directly down through the bulky seam in order to flatten it out.



I don't know if this is right or wrong, but it did seem to help wrestle those bulky parts into submission.  HOWEVER, where it wasn't possible for me to go directly through the seam -- perhaps it was so bulky my foot wouldn't fit over it -- I got as close as possible, but with a poor result.  Because the center of the bulk wasn't nailed down by quilting stitches, the result is a "nipple" in the quilt.  Well, that's what if feels like!  Get your heads out of the gutter for just a second.



You see how it has puffed up that intersection of seams, and since there are bulky seams underneath, it is hard.  It feels like a nipple under a shirt.

What could I have done to avoid these areas?  Well, it just so happens that Cindy advocates stitching in the ditch EVERY seam before you do any other quilting design.  She calls it ESS - "Every Stinking Seam".  When she said this in class that Friday, I remember thinking, "that's easy for you to say lady, you didn't just take a class with a baby quilt with 723 pieces!!!".  But, she is right.  I would have had to use my walking foot  because of the bulkiness.  But, just looking at the intersection above, I would have sewn over that area 3 times instead of once.  That would have really nailed down that seam.

Honestly, I was lazy.   All I was thinking was how an easy all over stipple would spread out that excess fabric I was dealing with.  I gave little thought to the bulky seams.

In case you are wondering, Cindy recommends ESS for every quilt, or "ESQ" if I may.  She showed us several examples of how it really improves the look of your piecing skills and makes your quilting designs better because they are stabilized and don't warp during the quilting process.  Both her "in class" lecture and the one on Craftsy shows these samples, but obviously seeing them in person you can really see the difference better than on camera.  Did I head such advice?  Uh, not this time obviously.

So to recap my lessons learned from this quilt:

1) If it's not broke, don't fix it!  I personally like my basting method better.  There have only been a few times where I have had any issues of pleating or gathering on my backing and I could probably point the finger at the quilt bunching up while in the machine rather than the basting method.  I also like having the top and batting tensioned the same.  Also, my hands are also a lot less sore because I don't have to tension them while quilting as much (even with gloves).

Finally, I want to share something that I had forgotten that another teacher told me - I believe it was Dawn Cavanaugh who was teaching us how to load our quilts into the long arm frames in the long arm class I took.  None of the layers were tight.  Smooth yes, but not tight.  She sited how hand quilters put their quilts into their frames with some slack.  Yes, some of that has to do with the fact that you need a little room to rock the needle, but she said the same applied to machine quilting.  You don't need anything super tight.  Excess fabric is a problem, but introducing any stretch to your quilt is just going to make it shrink up and cause distortion in the stitches.  Personally I think as long as everything is done evenly, at least your quilt will be consistent.  That is why I think Cindy's technique is unbalanced.  My bottom layer is tensioned differently than the other layers, so of course it is going to behave differently and influence my other layers.

The OBW isn't the only quilt I tried Cindy's method on.  I also basted the Discontinuity baby quilt with the 723 pieces (I really need to come up with a better name for it that "Demon Quilt") using her method.  I didn't have exactly the same problem.  BUT, I think it is because there are different things going on with the baby quilt than with the OBW.  First of all, I have all those rows of horizontal seams that I am stitching in the ditch with my walking foot.  Quilting straight lines is different because I only need to spread out 3 inches of fabric at a time and I'm only travelling in one direction, not wiggling all over the place.  I've also double batted that quilt, so it puffed up nicely in those rows and filled any excess fabric there.  There was some excess fabric around the edges of the quilt, which makes a little sense as the center of the quilt had the benefit of the weight of the rest of the quilt to smooth it out.  That excess around the edges made my perfectly square quilt a little less square at the end of the quilting process.  Luckily, it wasn't too off and I could trim the offensive corners a little.

Just like teachers say, "Every child is different", well every quilt is different too.  For now, I'm going back to my old way of basting.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

2)   Stitching in the ditch for ESS might be worth it.  Yes, it is going to take longer.  But I think it would have given me less headaches in the long run on the OBW quilt.  I did ESS on the Discontinuity quilt and while it took forever, it did nail everything down nicely.  Unfortunately, I didn't attempt to free motion quilt over all that ESS to see if it really made a difference.  I plan on doing that for my next quilt, the Les Amis quilt, so I can report back on that when completed.

There are always more lessons to be learned!

Thanks for reading today,

Jen

Paper Pieced Star Block Review

This Sunday, something a bit different, a block review!  Specifically a review of the Paper Pieced Star Block  from the book, Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop for Quilters.

OK.  A while back, I promised a review of this block.  I made several for a paper pieced hive in the 3 x 6 Bee group on Flickr.  This was the block I chose to make, and I had some difficulties with it.  

First, before making 6 blocks for other people, I like to make a tester block so I know what I am getting into.  My tester block came out alright.

It isn't perfect. As you can see, the block is a little tilted.  I probably had to cut it that way because the background fabric (the cream) didn't allow for trimming properly.  But, the center points actually look OK.  So I figured, I could easily make sure I trimmed a little more straightly and all would be well.

It wasn't that easy.  The next block I made, also couldn't be trimmed properly because the background fabric didn't reach all the way to one corner.  My points in the center also did not align properly, so I took the block completely apart and tried again.  Twice.

The block's construction seems straightforward.  You make the paper pieces, put them together, trim the block to size, then add the borders.  I am not sure what the deal was, but one of the pieces in the pattern gave me more trouble than others, piece #3, and because of it my trimming was limited.  At first I thought that maybe that pattern piece was increased differently when I printed the pattern out, but the other pieces on the same paper were the right size, so???   And, my points just weren't playing nicely.   Something about having five pieces coming together in a half, instead of the usual four, really threw things off.  So, I looked for tips from some of my favorite paper-piecers.

Thanks to some fabulous tips I read on Lily's Quilts, some I learned in a paper pieced class, and some of my own, I was able to finish the blocks and have them come out alright.  I want to share these tips with you.

The first tip is Lynne's from Lily's Quilts.  She suggests adding an additional amount of background fabric around your block by redrawing these lines on your foundation pieces:

As you can see, I added about 1/2 inch all the way around.  This STILL wasn't enough.  For this particular block, I think I would add at least 3/4 inch.

Once you get all the pieces of the star paper pieced and it is time to put them together, I found it very helpful to lay them face down, in numerical order before sewing the pieces together.  For some reason, even if I ordered them correctly, but had them face up, I would inevitably put two of the pieces together on the wrong sides.

Next a tip I picked up from Carol Doak, with an additional tip from Lynne.  When putting your seams from two pieces together, stick a pin vertically into the seam line on your foundation.

 If the pin, pierces the line on the underside piece, you know your seams will be in the right place.

Then place pins to hold your pieces together as you normally would.  If the pins you pierced the lines with, are still straight up and down, you know your pieces didn't shift, and your seams will be where they are supposed to be.

the one on the right is being pushed by the mat underneath, but look at how straight the center pin is!

Now the important part from Lynne - ***make sure you sew this seam from the center point OUT towards the sides of your block.***  No matter how well you pin, some shifting may still occur under the foot of your machine.  You want to make sure the center seams are sewn first to minimize the shifting in this area.  It is less important toward the edges of the block.

Another great tip from Lynne involves the last step - sewing the two halves of the block together - if you apply the same pinning method above, but make sure there is a vertical pin right in the center where your points are aligning.  Take your pinned pieces over to your machine and try to replace this vertical pin with the needle of your machine (putting the machine needle in the same hole you just removed your pin from) - sewing from the center of the block towards one side, then starting in the center again, sew to the opposite side.  I found it a little tricky to actually replace the pin, BUT I did think the results were much better trying this tip than if I just sewed the entire seam from one side of the block to the other.

There you have it.  A block much closer to the way it is supposed to look.

Do I recommend this block?

Well.......I did find it much more difficult than some of the other paper pieced stars I have tried in the past that had eight segments instead of the ten this one has.  This might not seem that important, but I think it added a degree of difficulty since the block wasn't in perfect proportions from the start.  Plus, look at all the adjustments I had to make to the pattern to get it to work nicely!  If it wasn't for Lynne's tips, these blocks would have been a disaster!

Thus, I don't think I would recommend it for any beginners.  I even think it will be quite a while before I try it again.

As for the book, Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop for Quilters, I'm not ready yet to write a full review of the book.  I've only tried two blocks and I doubt it would be a fair review if I stopped there.  So look for that book review later after I've had time to play some more.

I hope this was helpful!

Thanks for reading,

Jen