The Learning Quilt

Oh my goodness. I am so in love with the colors of this quilt. It is what I had envisioned when I put my three charm packs of jewel toned batiks together. I ordered the black 2-1/2" strips to go with the batiks. I love surrounding rich colors with black, they just stand out so much better.
The process seemed straight forward enough. I saw this quilt in a video done by Jen at Missouri Star Quilts YouTube videos. (Those videos are a gold mine if you have never seen them before...check it out!)

Yes, that is left over snow on the ground.

At my age you would think I would know by now that nothing with me is ever straight forward. Nothing! I cut the pieces like Jen said, I sewed them together, everything...by the book. Well, after getting the chain piecing done, I started in putting the different pieces together and no...they weren't fitting properly. I was having to pull and push and pull again. Then I looked closer at what I had in my hands. Every single chained pieced section was sewn at an angle and I had 1/4" seams at one end, 3/16" at the other end.
Yeah...dammit!

I started looking at what could be the problem. (you know, beside myself because I am not the problem here...ever) What I found was that somehow, the little sticker thingy that I have as a guide for my 1/4" seams is off a bit. Could it have moved? I don't know the answer to that. I haven't even removed it yet. Please don't ask me why. But if you just did, I think it's because I don't want to mess with the sticky residue just yet. Go figure.

I messed around with other ways to get an accurate 1/2" seam. I found a foot I have in my stash that I never paid much attention to. I got it out, looked it up in my machine's owner's manual and lo and behold, this foot is so a person can sew and accurate seam in a measurement of his/her choosing. Okay wait, what? I've had this machine since 2013. Can you say, "Slow to learn?"

Okay. We got it going now! YAY! I started back in sewing pieces into blocks and then blocks into rows. I sewed the first two rows together and checked out my handy work...I sewed the top row to the bottom of the next row! Rip, rip, rip.
Re-sewed. Got it right, sewed the next being very careful to place the rows in the right positions. Got the second one! Onto the third...upside down. Rip, rip, rip.
And on it went.

One morning, everything I touched on that quilt top was wrong, so I set it aside until the afternoon.
I finally did get the whole thing put together. (big sigh) and I am in love with it.
There are puckers where I didn't resew a seam or sixteen that had the wrong seam allowance. This is going to be a couch cuddler, it's not going to any shows, so I figured I would save some time and a few bucks worth of thread.

So, the reason I call it the learning quilt is because I learned a few things about me, my cutting techniques, my machine parts, and my patience levels. (Those are actually not too bad. I don't think I swore all that much!)

I  am planning on putting a solid black border around the whole quilt, just to finish it off, plus I have some of the strips left over. Or maybe those could be the biding...hmmm...I don't know. Right now I am just happy to have gotten this far!

At some point this year, I will be quilting all the tops I have to quilt, because I KNOW that I will get me sewing to the place where I get to pull out both cutting tables, put them together and baste my layers together.