Alignment trials

Electric Quilt templates give you cropped corners on templates for alignment, which I generally like for angled quilt block pieces. The tricky part is cutting them accurately. When possible, I use Marti Michell’s acrylic templates for cutting pieces as they include the trimmed corners and make it easy to trim them at the same time that your pieces are being cut. Not having acrylic templates sized for the Diamond 4-patch project, I was putting off starting to piece because of the alignment issue. Once I was ready to sew I tried a couple of techniques.

Stacking the many bias-edge pieces of fabric to do the trimming at the points was difficult both due to the stretch of the bias and not having a template that could be used with a rotary cutter (paper or plastic eventually get shaved out of shape.)

On a group quilt project with similar angles, our leader made templates for aligning the pieces for pinning, so I printed out a paper template from EQ, cut the points off just two pieces, aligned the first triangle on top of the paper template, lined up the 2^nd triangle and drew lines on the paper. I tested a few blocks and found this to be fairly accurate. I spent some quality TV time with a lap board pinning all of the sets. After sewing more sets together I found that it worked better to take another look at the alignment and adjust them by eye for a more accurate fit.

Once the block halves were sewn together, the intersection of the batik and black were leaving a very scant seam allowance. I didn’t think of it right away, but found a fix by taking a slightly wider seam at the intersection of the block halves. Designing your own block creates some challenges, but also the flexibility to make changes to sold problems.

 

Dancing Stars blocks are coming together nicely, after printing out part of the quilt in EQ to figure out how to press the seams for minimal bulk. I’m using Eleanor Burn’s trick for spinning the center seams at the sub-sets and the center seam so that all of the outside seams on each block are pressed clockwise (as seen from the top). This way the will nest together with all adjacent blocks without any twisted seams.