A Youtuber posted a video on problems he was having on HST construction. He was looking for help. He was perplexed because the HST's were die cut (Accuquilt), yet when he was assembling them, the block was not coming out as planned. That my very first quilt was nothing sort of disasterous was a GOOD thing. Why? Because it sent me down the proper road of determining what I was doing wrong. As it turns out, everything.
If one's block is not assembling as expected, it is going to be due to the following:
- Incorrect cutting
- Inaccurate piecing
- Inconsistent seam line
- not straight
- not scant enough
- too scant
- too wide
- Stretching from bias
- in handling
- in piecing
- in pressing
- Incorrect Pressing
- stretching bias
- leaving a fold in the fabric
For this YouTuber, I carefully viewed his video panning of his project frame by frame. It satisfied my OCD tendencies to figuring out problems. I shared these observations with the Youtuber.
Here's what I found.
Issue 1: Incorrect alignment and sewing. Look at the picture below. These are two halves of die cut HST's. I put arrows at problem points.
The HST has the obvious issue that it is not lined up correctly. The left hand side does not match (so there is a left to right shift, and the top right corner is shifted down. None of the bottom fabric should have been visible on a die cut piece. And anything on an diagonal is going to compound. Further, the seam line should have gone directly through the point of the white fabric (which it does not because that point rests below the blue fabric.
💡 Worth noting that if these blocks had been cut slightly oversized (e.g. size of finished block + 1"), then trimming down (using the closed method!) would have fixed this issue. I presume that Accuquilt die cut HST's aren't trim friendly as they are die cut)
Issue 2: Imbalance between fabrics in diagonal. This issue is a continuation of the problem from above.
Notice that the corner of the HST is not evenly split. When you are joining two fabrics that must meet in a diagonal: the corner must be evenly split between both fabrics. There is no balance. As these are die cut HSTs the issue is simply the issue that is expressed in the first image: The seam line should be going through the point of the white fabric...it is going through the point on the blue, but night the white. Again, poor alignment is the blame.
Issue 3: More incorrect alignment:
There's 2 issues here. First issue is of course all that blue peeking out from beind the white. But also, I can see that the selvage is included and is askew. It's the askew that means that the block will be off grain.
I pointed out these observations to the Youtuber, and I hope that they offered some help. (However, I will not visit this site again as I didn't even get a thank you for my effort). In his case, he was stating that he was getting unexpected results (e.g. blocks not aligning as expect) in fact, he got exactly the type of results that any of us get when the issues noted above happen in our work--(and had the hubris to think that he should contact Accuquilt to let them know something was wrong with the die cut). Yes I get pi$$y!
And in my first quilt, I had all of those issues and more. So much so, I was so far out of alginment on my on points blocks that I had to put a pocket on the quilt to cover it up.
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