Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Disaster Strikes!

Its late (for me) so I'm feeling a little melodramatic, I admit.

But seriously. What do you do when you make a total mess of someone else's quilt? In my Threads Together quilting bee, betty ninja asked us to paper piece her some triangle blocks. After my first batch of fabric got lost in the mail, I finally received my second batch. Completely overestimating my abilities to paper piece precisely, I decided to do some of these . The finished blocks on the twiddletails quilt are 6", so I thought I would just do four for each 12" block and it would be all good. But I didn't quite have enough background fabric unless I cut really, really closely.

So I cut really closely. Too closely. And now I have 16 finished rows of triangles that are slightly wonky, have a very scant 1/4 of an inch seam allowances and aren't going to make 12" blocks, because there's just not enough fabric left on the edges for proper seam allowances. Blech. The secret perfectionist in me is doing its best impression of "The Scream". The rest of me is madly scrambling to fix the blocks so they'll be usable and look okay when they are finished, with only four very thin triangles of background fabric to patch them together with.

On the other hand, the points are brilliant. I think I only cut off 3 points out of 48 triangles. There is that about paper piecing, it certainly is precise.

I think its time for me to go to bed and look at this with a fresh perspective in the morning. It can't possibly look worse than it does right now, right? Right?

2 comments:

Shannon said...

Poor Betty, it seems like a lot of people had trouble with her block. I know I certainly did. Can you add some sashing between the blocks? Other people used some of the triangle fabric for background bits, and I thought they looked really nice.

bettyninja said...

Sorry it's driving you nuts! I'll be completely happy with whatever you end of doing- no worries!!