The Wonder of the Internet | Learn Anything; See Anything

 I've learned many things from the internet. Everything I learned about quilting I learned from the internet--so many gifted teachers.  I was tempted to say "know" v. "learn" .  However, we learn by watching, and truly know by failing and successively failing better.

My current project has allowed me to "know" a few things.

Knowing 1: Consider the block above.  The center is a 9 patch of 1" finished pieces.  It's quite a few !#%#$^& seams.  The flanking blocks are 3" finished.  There are so many seams in the thickness of the middle block that I need a wee bit more scant than normal to clear the size of the block.  

Knowing 2: My current worry is that a I have very small margin for error on the corner blocks, specifically the small white triangle.  I am likely going to clip my points short.  While my test block worked out well, over the course of the 256 flanking triangles I that had to piece, I'm a hair short.  I may be able to work with this when piecing my blocks together.

Knowing  3:  Unsure about this, but I'm sure I'll get about 3 more "knowings" once I piece the darn thing together.

Knowing 4:  Use of gated foot.  I have a Bernina gated foot which is wonderful.  It is built in a fashion (and priced accordingly!) so that the gate has a spring that allows it to move over the terrain of your seams.  Magnificently engineered. Because it is engineered so, it does not drag or snag on your fabric. In making the endless HST's and QST's in this project, I elected to omit the sew lines and just use the diagonals.  That's 4 less lines that you have to mark.  Yes, I know that there are methods you can use where you put your diagonal on marked 1/4" offset, but that does not work for large squares where the line is occulted by the fabric.

Here's my gated foot in action.  I let the gate ride directly on the line. It is far easier for me to guide the fabric against the front of the gated foot than the side of the foot.  Because I put dabs of glue on my fabric to hold it together, there are no pins, no distortion.  Plus I assembly line the joining, marking and sewing.  When you don't use pins, you can stack up great mountains of assembled stuff to sew, and then chain piece away without removing one pin. (Yes, I'm evangelizing the benefits of glue basting). Time saving.  Accurate.

Design Wall Move: I'm very happy with my design wall move.  I had to move around lots of stuff, but I'm liking that I have a more room to move.  To stay organized, I like to put my cut pieces in a plastic bag with an index card that tells me how many and for what.  Now that my design wall is behind my cutting areas, it is very easy to do that.  I just cut, put in bag and label, and pin them to the wall.  I have two-pronged jeweler's box pins that are sharp.  They hold "stuff" up on that board wonderfully without putting too much pressure on one point...which means your good pins do not get bent.

 

Labeling Quilt Rows:  Take a look at Carol Thelan's excellent video on labeling quilting rows.  I was so enchanted with this method, I bought some plastic key tag rings from Amazon to  duplicate.

She has many other excellent videos on Youtube.