Fabric Squeezing…..

When last I spoke of the Pinwheel quilt (you can read it HERE), I had cut several pieces at 4.75 inches instead of 5 inches and was running out of background fabric!! I had a busy work week and it was a full SEVEN days before I could get back to the studio to see if I could fix the problem. It drove me crazy the whole time!!

Fortunately, only one of the three erroneous blocks had actually been sewn into the top so I was able to fix them without too much ripping.

I found a small, 1-inch strip of fabric that I had pitched into the scraps and sewed it onto the edge of the three blocks…..

But as I started to trim them down to the PROPER size, I realized that the seam allowance from the addition would be in the way when I pieced it in place…..

The solution was to trim it starting on the OTHER (newly sewn strip) side…..

That way there was a full 3/4 inch on the skinny side.

So this is where it stood…..

….and I still needed several longer strips to fill it in. Actually, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the bottom row was going to need even MORE strips so I was really sweating the amount of fabric that I had left!!

Needless to say I used the old carpenter’s adage of ….

….except I measured three or four times before I cut the final strip……

I also had to piece some bits together to get the longer strips that I needed…..

Both of the bottom corners looked like this…..

That is why it is called a “PATCH” work quilt…..right???

Michael happened to be upstairs as I sewed the last seam and caught me in the act…..

Actually, he caught me in the act so many times that I finally had to say STOP….

And then, as I was putting it on the wall to photograph, I noticed that one of the corners was torn…..

Fortunately I had one triangle left over from the side setting triangles so I sewed it in, even if the bias was on the outside. I can just be careful with it until the borders are on!!

Here it is……

And I can breath once again knowing that I will not run out of fabric!!

It still needs to be trimmed up and borders added…… but that is for another day!!