A Fine Romance - Step One, The Sashing Strips

It's all about between, which perfectly sums up my life since the beginning of the year. Personally, we're still waiting for that other shoe to drop. Any.day.now. And then there are these sashing strips. Simple shapes, right? Easy Peasy. Well, as it turns out, yes and no.

Electric Quilt is just the best for designing quilts, especially the piecing part. I use it all the time to build the framework for my applique designs. One of the functions I love the most is being able to print out rotary cutting instructions for each block. It's terrific! The default setting is to state the sizes to the nearest eighth of an inch, which is just right most of the time.

It wasn't until I'd stitched out all sixty-eight of my four-patches, and then added the half square triangles that it occurred to me to measure the thing. They were about an sixteenth of an inch shy!

I went back to EQ and selected to have the sizes print out to the nearest sixteenth of an inch. (Something I usually do automatically.) Darned if the squares weren't listed as a sixteenth of an inch larger!

Now I know that I already have some quilters shaking in their shoes because there are no many eighth of an inch measurements. For the life of me, I don't understand the fear. The eighths are as clearly marked as the quarters and halves! I could only imagine how heads would explode is I suggested that anything be cut to a sixteenth of an inch. (Even though it's only halfway between the eights, how hard is that?)

So I fussed around and found that by rounding up on some shapes and rounding down on others, and with some careful attention to seam allowance, the sashing strips come out to pretty close to the right size. So, my dear quilting friends, just stay vigilant about seam allowance and all will be well.

What I thought folks would get their knickers in a twist over was the zillions of four-patches. Strip piecing is not my friend, especially the part where I have to cut each segment individually. So I wrote the pattern for both strip piecing and cutting the individual squares.

Step One is posted here. I'll have two more blog posts on piecing strategies in the coming days.

And just because the cold and gray of winter is finally getting to me, and I can't stand how gray and lifeless this post looks, here is a gratuitous picture of preparing the large flower applique pieces.