WIP–Ready, Start, Resew!

Thanks to Lee at Freshly Pieced Fabrics, who allows us to totally reveal what clutzoid quilters we can be on her WIP Wednesdays.  Read on.

Okay, so this is the plan.  (I think I say that a lot.)  I saw this Rubik’s Crush quilt a year or so ago and it finally came out in a magazine (photo above) and I finally got it cut out, and tonight (roll the drums) I finally found an hour that someone hadn’t asked for and sat down to sew.  Usually I’d sit down and read blogs (because usually I’m tired at night) but it was either sew or read.

I should have read.

I got out my trusty-dusty quilty book, with all its pages and laid out the squares and the little rectangles that go in between.  I sew.  Somewhere in the back of my mind was a nag: check your seam allowances.  I promptly ignored that little voice because I was listening to RadioLab’s podcast about Games and it was way more fascinating than what was going on in my head.  Sew sew sew.

Then Ashley, of Film in the Fridge Fame (love that alliteration–we’ve been doing poetry in my classes) says in her instructions to press open all the seams.

What A Pain.  A Royal Pain.

But I’m good at following directions, so I do this with eight billion little seam allowances because I want to be a Modern Quilt Artist when I grow up.  Oh yes, and whatever Ashley says, I’m gonna do.

I lay out all the cross-strips and all of sudden I realize that I’m a good half-inch longer in my block strips than is the cross strip.  I measure the cross strip.  It’s cut accurately.  This is not what I wanted to realize.  Because that leads to the conclusion that I now have to resew all those seams.  I’m only off by a thread or two.  I can restitch those seams.  That’s not hard.  (Yes, there is another solution, but I don’t see that there is, so I charge ahead.  Keep reading.)

I start resewing.  And if you think I’m unpicking the first seam so I can press everything open again, you are pretty much nuts.

So I press them all to one side.  I know what this will do to the look of my quilt, because I wrote about pressing/ironing/sculpting seams and all that in the post just below (go look if you want to see an unclothed ironing board).  My blocks will have definition.  They will have some ridges.  They won’t be flat, modern-looking blocks.  I won’t be cool like Ashley.

So I have three inner-parts sewn now.  I have to make 17 of these and I have probably have nine squares in transit.  I’m really seriously considering disobeying Ashley’s instructions and making my centers 8″.  The quilt will probably recover from this gross error.  I may not recover if I have to sew eight billion (minus three blocks) teensy little seams again.  I have discovered the other solution: recut the center strips.

What would you do?  Cut new center strips and move forward?  Restitch?  That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall as I grade student quizzes, so there’s just no room inside my brain for solutions to serious quilt dilemmas.   I could really use your advice.