Saturday, February 13, 2010

Four Patches and rulers

Today I taught a quilt class. We made Chinese Coin quilts to celebrate Chinese New Year! I had four students and we had a fine time chatting and sewing. Nobody got their top all the way finished, but everyone got their strip sets done and some of the sashings sewn on. I am confident that my students will finish their quilts and they will be lovely!


We did have one slight issue with a ruler. We needed a ruler that was 6 1/2 inches wide, and I grapped one that was hanging up on the back of the classroom door that looked about 7 inches wide. I didn't supervise this student's cutting, and she came to me after cutting one set and told me that her strips had a problem. They were definitely not 6 1/2 inches wide. I looked at the ruler, and discovered that it had markings that were not 1 inch apart. This was some kind of specialty ruler for cutting on the diagonal and the lines printed on it were much closer together. Luckily she was able to cut an extra strip from each set, so will have a quilt with more columns, but they will be narrower. I felt badly for not catching the problem before she started cutting. I did mark the ruler so it won't happen to anyone else. In the future I will be sure to be more aware of the ruler markings! It did give us a good opportunity to discuss rulers and measurements, though!


I worked on four patches for my Gypsy Rose quilt tonight. I have them all ready to put on the design wall tomorrow. I'm not 100% sure I like the fabric for the setting triangles, but I think once I lay out the squares I will have a little better idea of if I want to change it or not. This is a Jelly Roll quilt, so lots of fun to sew because there is no pre-cutting needed!


1 comment:

sewfunquilts said...

I had a similar happening to one of my students a few years ago, and her cutting, strips, blocks were just not sized correctly & lining up. After many trials & errors, I discovered her Fiskars cutting mat ruler marks were not printed on the mat correctly.

She was a newbie and took it back to the store for a refund.

Glad you discovered that about the ruler.