It Pays to Plan Ahead

When I designed the back of Abby's quilt, I sketched it out briefly on a little piece of paper paper (not a napkin, as I've also been known to do). After all, I wanted the math to be correct because I had a finite amount of fabric to use and to be quite honest, I didn't want to screw it up. 

Imagine my surprise when instead of the nice little square that I had drawn, the sides didn't looked too long. Ah ha! I didn't draw to scale. If only I had used the graph paper that I have stashed in various places around the house!

Well hopefully, I could take that as a 'lesson learned' as we say where I work. This time when I wanted to work on some paper piecing, not only did I sketch it all out to scale, but I even got out my colored pencils and colored in the blocks. (Makes me think I may want to get EQ, but I'm not sure yet.)

As you can see, there is a different design appearing when I use two rows rather than three. It really paid off that I learned that lesson, I thought. 

Next step was to draw out the block and stitch one out as a sample.

Looks great! Oh, hold on a sec...if I sew this into a project, my beautiful points will be in the seam allowance. Ugh!

Enter stage right, my friend Angela from Blue Tree Studio. She showed me how by just extending a few of the sewing lines, my seams will be a-okay.

 

I have learned that I am trainable and am able to improve the quality of my work by taking time out to think things through. Yeah!