Precision Counts When Making a Quilt

Hopefully you've never had this happen. But unfortunately I think most quilters have had a case where they've made a block and the next one doesn't come out the same size. As you can see, this particular block came out right at three quarters of an inch smaller than the one next to it. This one finished at 10 inches. And this one is three quarters of an inch smaller. Significant difference. I am a professional long arm quilter and the title indicates that I quilt for a living. I have several sewing machines in addition to my long arm and I tend to switch back and forth between them. I learned a sad lesson in that I started this block on one machine and I came and did this one on another. This is my little travel sewing machine and we were camping and I decided I'd take some blocks along and sew them at the campground. Well apparently, the foot size after much frustration, I thought was it the way I cut it out? Were the blocks cut wrong? And finally I realized that my foot might have been different. I had a quarter inch foot which I just got for this machine and apparently it is a little bit different size than the quarter inch foot for my Pfaff. And so I was trying to figure out how I could rectify this because if I use this foot, all of my blocks were going to come out smaller. You say, how can that happen? Well, if you notice, we have two diagonal seams. We have three horizontal seams. And if each one is off, even just, let's say an eighth of an inch. Let's say these three were off by an eighth of an inch. That's going to mean we have on either side of the seam, an eighth of an inch. So that's one quarter inch, two quarter inches, three quarter inches right there for being simply by an eighth of an inch. I don't think my machine was off that much. That would be a significant difference in the size here. But I think it was probably more like a sixteenth. So even at a sixteenth difference, you would have one eighth, two eighths, three eighths, four eighths, which is a half of an inch and now you're at five eighths, which is pretty darn close to this three quarter inch. Assuming that I sewed everything absolutely perfectly. So it is important to make sure that whatever machine and whatever foot you start with you continue with it so that this won't happen. It's bad enough that the blocks were off. Let's say you were sewing same sized blocks together. And let's assume we have a hundred inch quilt. We want it to finish at a hundred inches. If you're off, again, by an eighth of an inch, all the way across that quilt. And I'm gonna have to fight to do the math, let's say you have ten inch blocks, so that's ten blocks across. Makes nine seams times an eighth of an inch for each one. Would now, you're going to be short an inch and an eighth by the time you get to one end of the quilt. And if you aren't off on a different row, now your quilt's out of square. So precision is vital when you're quilting. And one of the major areas is with your foot. So I didn't want to stop sewing, I wanted to continue. So I had to find a work around. And what I did was I put, let me go back here, I put my regular sewing foot back on. This is my all purpose, everyday sewing foot that goes onto the machine. So I put that on instead of my quarter inch foot. Which really, was frustrating because I loved the accuracy of the quarter inch. But I put this one on and went ahead and folded my seam back so I could see the stitching line. I went ahead and put the edge of my foot at the edge of the fabric. And as you can see, the needle is off from the stitch line. So I simply moved my stitch line over 'till it matched up with the seam line that I had already stitched. And I just go ahead and put my needle down make sure I'm exactly where I want to be. I made note of that measurement so that the rest of the time when I sewed I knew to punch in that number that moved my needle over. Because as soon as I turn my machine off it resets to center line and zero. So I remembered what this was, I used that as my new seam line and I continued sewing and the rest of my blocks miraculously came out at the ten inch size. So hopefully this little tip will help you in the future so that all of your blocks will line up, your quilts will be square. And you won't have this frustration that I had of why is my block so much smaller?