Thursday, November 21, 2013

The Dark Side of Chain Piecing

Chain piecing is a great quilting technique.  Line up the series of pieces and do them all at once.  No cutting thread in between so it's fast and efficient.

For my Christmas quilt I needed a bunch of little triangles sewn together.  No problem!  I've got this!  So between shuttling kids around in the car yesterday, doing laundry, and cooking dinner I made a long lovely chain of sewn triangles that looked like this:

Great stuff!  Just needed to press them and get them ready to trim:

Yay!  Lots of little triangles sewn together.  A good days work.

Except.

They weren't supposed to be sewn long sides together.  They were supposed to have short sides sewn together.  Since I chain pieced them, I managed to make the same mistake about 60 times.  Go me.  This nice little pile of half-square triangles got put into a bag to be used someday for something else.

Back to the cutting board today.  A million more tiny triangles.

See?  Short sides together with a big triangle attached.  Now they're ready for trimming.   I know yesterday I said I thought I was done making mistakes on this quilt.  Now I'm not so sure.  Obviously I need to pay better attention to what I'm doing.

My amaryllis bulbs tell me Christmas is coming.  Their holiday pots are covered up because I don't like Christmas decorations to come out before Thanksgiving.  The bulb on the right looks like it wants to open soon though. 


We finally turned the heat on and I put both cat beds by a vent.  They opted to share one though.  Hestia brought along a toy. 


3 people stopped folding laundry to write:

slow panic said...

OH! I have made similar mistakes chain piecing. I'm embarrassed about how many times I have sewn things wrong sides together.....

Laura said...

Oh no!!! You must have been so frustrated when you went to cut the chain apart.

Rosemary said...

I think cats snuggled by the heater are one of the joys of winter.

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