PART FOUR: Chevron style St. Clements quilt

///I'm back from the land of Bedfordshire and up for another afternoon's quilting. I had planned meeting people for an afternoon of French chat and Galette des Rois eating but I got snowed in. Oh well, good excuse to do some more quilting///

PINNING THE COLUMNS TOGETHER

Put the columns together (right sides together). Make sure that the horizontal seams are lined up because it will look better later on, but you also need to make sure that the points of the triangles match as well.

Matching horizontal seams and triangle points

 

I used a ruler to make a straight edge which gives me an idea of what the sewing will look like when I'm done. It then means that I can immediately pin the fabric and draw a line, which I will sew along.

I am double-checking that tacked seam in this picture. It didn't seem (fighting the urge to pun here) right so I drew a line a bit nearer the edge to make a better finish.

Pinned, tacked and the guideline has been drawn. 

  

TACKING AND SEWING COLUMNS TOGETHER

I tacked (left image: in white) and drew a line, in biro, to indicate more clearly where I should machine sew.

N.B. better to tack in a different colour thread if you has it as it's easier to unpick later! (see right image)

 

When you sew, sometimes the flappy triangle bits will get in the way. (I haven't cut them off as yet as, earlier, they helped me to see what the triangles should be in line with). 

To make the flappy bits flat, make sure your needle is down, then click the foot up and just flatten the flappy bits the right way, then click the foot back down.

Needle down, foot goes up

Organise flappy bits

Foot down, continue sewing

EXAMPLES OF SEWING CHEVRONS

Here are some examples of the fact that it doesn't always turn out right first time and that sometimes you need to check and check again to get a good result. Instagram is testament to this - just look up #unpicking if you ever feel overwhelmed about the whole thing!

This tacking seemed to work well but I knew I needed to make the seam allowance a bit bigger so I got a nice point on the inside of the chevron

This one went completely wonky so I undid the bottom, jiggled it about a bit and retacked and stitched it so it looked better.

STOP! In the name of Quilts! What on Earth is that hole doing there?!

Random unsewn line of sewing within the quilt

TIP: Make sure that the bobbin is full of cotton. When quilting, you can sew a whole line and not realise quarter of the way through that your bobbin thread has gone. To me, it looked as though the sewing was done because the top thread was there, but actually, it hadn't been sewn because the bobbin thread wasn't there. Hence, I had a hole in my quilt which was tricky - but not impossible - to correct. 

See my later blog post on WHIP STITCH

So you've sewn two columns together, and another two columns together. Now you want to put each set of two columns together. Easy peasy. Just do the same as before! Right sides facing and just make sure it's the right way up and that the correct patterns are matching.

Almost finished. A last double-check before I sew on my last column. I just checked the size of my quilt against the last one I made. It's a wee bit too small so I'm going to add a border of orange fabric to make it bigger with minimal work, and then I'll sew some yellow bias binding around the edges. This also gives a nice finish to the quilt and brings all those lovely colours together. 

 It's the final quilt seam... Doodle oo doo doodle ooh doo doo doodle ooh doo doo, nearly the final quilt seam!

THEEEEEN - Iron your seams! 

I always feel like when you finally get to iron the seams you must've done a load of work and need a reward. I had a cup of tea and a biscuit after this one. It's snowing too so just making quilts made me feel that little bit warmer and cosier. My chickens didn't think so, though. "Sorry Phyllis! I don't control the weather."

HAPPY QUILTING!