In the Longarm community, we often remind ourselves there is probably a good reason an old quilt was never finished. This block would be a good example of that rule of thumb. I forgot to take a photo before I separated the four segments - but you can plainly see why I took out some of the original seams. Well, first you might notice the points don't match at all, the use of the striped fabric is quirky, with two triangles having stripes going parallel to short sides, while another one has the stripes parallel to the long side, and on the last, the stripes are perpendicular to the long side. But those flaws are not fatal.
The real issue is visible at the lower left in the photo above. That muslin piece is all folded up and doesn't want to be flat at all. Wonky piecing of that magnitude cannot be quilted out. I thought I might take the blocks completely apart and re-piece them. It would be easy because they were hand-pieced, and the rules of the challenge don't preclude it; however, you can also see at the very edge, lower left, that the fabric is fraying like mad. The fraying really eats up practically all of the seam allowance. I pondered cutting the frayed pieces into smaller triangles and remaking the pinwheels, but, if I took them apart, I'd still be dealing with the nasty fraying issue the same as the original piecer. I made doll dresses back when I was in grade school with my mother's fabric remnants. One of those was a black and white woven fabric very much like this red and white one, and that dress fell apart at the seams. And taking it completely apart, well, that felt like it was not in the New from Old spirit of the challenge.
I'll talk about what I'm doing with this piecing question when I update with my progress.
Like the last challenge in this series (we don't know how many quilts Dorry has in store for us!) we were supposed to include blue in our finished piece ("...something borrowed, something blue.") Different from the last one however, she sent us a fat quarter we're supposed to use in the quilt.
Pink. PINK!!
Pink and BLUE!!!! I normally don't work in Pink and Blue by choice, so that's my real challenge!
1 comment:
Aah, but what's the point of an easy challenge? Just as the blocks are not all exactly the same (some people have a block where all four pinwheels are the same while some have one similar to yours and some have one that includes a third pink fabric) so too do the fat quarters vary. Some of us have this pale pink batik while others have a pastel blue pindot fabric and yet others have a darker blue batik. A challenge indeed. Have fun!
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