This is a stack of 12 Block A's - only 4 more left to piece!
If I hadn't spent almost as much time 'ripping' as I've spent 'piecing' these blocks, I'd probably already have them done! I went through 5 sewing machines before I could find one that wouldn't scoot the seam allowances at the intersections, causing mis-alignment issues from one end of the block to the other, resulting in untold hours of ripping...YUK! Finally, I dug my Juki 98e straight stitch machine out of storage - it was the ONLY machine that would sew over those intersections and keep everything all lined up nice and pretty w/virtually NO more shifting of seams and ultimate ripping...Yeah!
And I picked up a really neat pressing technique from Bonnie Hunter on page 2 in her instructions for Easy Street Mystery Quilt, Part VIII, and tweaked it for this block which helped sooo much in getting most of the intersected seams to 'stagger' with one caveat - I pressed 'open' ALL the double brick seams via Bonnie, which gave me some relief when getting all of those seams to lay nice and flat. Here's part of one of the backs of a Block A w/pressing option - notice the double brick seams pressed 'open':
And the rest of the back
And the entire pressed Block A:
The front of Block A partially pieced, ready for the final 'strip piecing' assembly:
And now, time to get back to piecing the final 4 Block A's so I can move on to those 9 block B's - you know what I'm doin' w/my weekend, in between coughing and blowing, don't you? (YES, I STILL have remnants of this blamed flu - talk about hangin' on, Geez!).
Later,
~Deb
Looking good! I do a lot of 'open seam' pressing when I have a block with many seams.
ReplyDeleteHey Miss Katie,
ReplyDeleteGreat seeing you again ;-) You know, I was raised/taught by my sewing ancestors that 'open seams' in quilting is a huge NO NO because they are considered much weaker to closed-pressed-to-the-side seams, so I knew about the open seam technique (especially in dressmaking, which is ALL we ever did, and that's a completely different story), but hadn't thought about it in years until Bonnie mentioned it and the light bulb came back on.
And it occurred to me that with longarm machine quilting, my Betty will much prefer open seams w/less bulk to quilt over rather than all those pressed closed seams with multiple layers to try and quilt through - much less chance of broken needles, etc.
So, have you noticed any seam weakening with your 'pressed open seam' technique in any of your quilts? Just curious to know how well they hold up ;-) Anyway, that's my plan for this entire quilt and I'm stickin' with it!
Thanks again for stoppin' by and hope to see you again real soon,
~Deb