Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Seams......Which Way?

This is the block from the Scrapaholic class that I have been making over and over - not the exact same block but more blocks like this one. (Not sure what happened when I took this photo but this block really is square and isn't as wonky as it looks in the photo.)

I changed the pressing a little from the suggested method to make the seams on the outside all swirl around the block. Makes setting the blocks together much easier if you can butt the seams. Bonnie's method for doing this works too but I just like my method a little better.

I needed to make the seams all point clockwise around the block. As you can see from the back of the block below part of the one long seam needs to go the opposite direction as the rest of it.
The three intersections on the left need to be pressed up and the one on the right needs to be pressed down. If I pressed it flat like that, there would be a fold that would create a large lump where changed directions as it folded over.
My solution was to pop the seam, peeling back the seam allowance of the tan triangle and with the point of an iron pressing the intersection open. The rest of the fabric at that intersection should stay pressed up to keep that point on that half square triangle unit staying sharp.
Move the tip of the iron to the right, narrowing the top seam allowance as you get close to the outside point. The seam allowance stays flat with just a thin fold on the one side and with no large lumps to deal with. The points of the half square triangles are all pressed the direction they want to go too.
When seam allowances of points get folded back over themselves they tend to be less than sharp and make a large lump in the block that is almost impossible to press flat. Pressing my way keeps the all the points sharp. Does this make sense? It is hard to explain but hope the photos help you understand how I am pressing those seams.
Today was another day of no harvest for me. We had heavy fog this morning and John had a meeting so it was after lunch before John was ready to start. Big problem - the combine had a breakdown and he had to drive 1 1/2 hr. one way to get parts, drive home the 1 1/2 hr. and put the combine all back together again. By then it was after 4:30 pm. Our part time help was here by then and they finally got started. It is now almost 10 pm and they are still out in the field and I would imagine that they will stay as long as they can as we are supposed to get rain again tomorrow. This harvest is really getting long with so many weather delays and delays in the corn moisture drying down. At this rate we will still be harvesting at Thanksgiving.

Happy Quilting,
Lynn

2 comments:

Geta Grama said...

I though the harvest ended ! Here last week fell the first snow !

Lynn said...

No we are not done yet - probably have half the corn acres yet to combine. It usually takes 5-6 weeks of steady work and this year have been slowed by rain, snow and high moisture corn.

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