More to the point!

Last year I signed up for a Craftsy class with Kimberly Einmo called Magical Jelly Roll quilts. This class is all about using jelly rolls, charm packs and layer cakes to make some traditional blocks but with a more contemporary look. I'm not really interested in patchwork for it's own sake, but this class looked as if it might be useful to me in my quilting journey.

I have a number of jelly rolls, charm packs and layer cakes in my stash, all of which I bought with an idea in mind that didn't in the end come to anything. So I started in on  the flying geese tutorial where Kimberly shows how to make flying geese in a way that doesn't waste any fabric and combine them with squares and triangles to make a very pretty quilt pattern.

Sometimes I do wonder about people who sit at their sewing machine and turn out perfect squares and triangles that lie flat and where all the points meet exactly.  Can it be that difficult? Well, it might look easy, but it isn't and some, including me, would say, so what?  But you know, there's something about the exercise of joining two pieces of fabric together and actually getting the resulting shape to behave just as you want it to, and for me recently it's become a bit of an obsession! Some would say, and who could blame them, to the point of becoming a nerd!!!!

So Kimberly's flying geese turn out to be perfect rectangles which need no trimming and are all the same size! My flying geese have wonky edges and are not at all the same size. So I practice and again and again I come up against the same problem. Kimberly advises using spray starch to stabilise the fabric so I try that with mixed results. Oh, I'm fed up so I'll move on to the next class!

Onto the Lonestar Strip magic! Once again, I followed the instructions and made a bit of a pigs ear, but I thought with practice again, I could do better. So I tried one of my new jelly rolls and found that no matter how I tried, it just wouldn't go together as it should.

I persevered, and after putting on a fake piping strip to conceal the fact that the points of the star disappeared in the border and some quilting; here it is made up into a cushion cover;

After a lot of head scratching, I finally got my ruler out and measured the strips and you know what? They're not 21/2 inches wide like it says on the packet, they actually measure 23/4 inches wide! Doesn't sound like much, but it explains a lot.

So, now I'm trying again having shaved 1/4 inch off each strip, measuring my scant 1/4 inch seam with a ruler before, during and after sewing, pressing not ironing etc. Will it make a difference?

Know what, yes it did! After being so careful with the measuring, cutting and sewing, I have a beautiful star. All the points meet, well almost; the middle is in the middle and,,,, wait for it..... the points at the edge are all 1/4" in from the edge, so haven't been cut off when I sewed on the border!

So here it is. Not yet quilted, but very satisfying to have done it!

Now having got that out of my system, I'm going back to "art"!