Fixing Major Piecing Mistakes-- WE GOT THIS!

     The night was sultry. She struggled through the first, then three more incorrectly sized borders easing them in so gently, making sure the points lovingly caressed each seam. The minutes went by in silence until the rickety-rack tempo of the sewing machine reached the end of the last seam... a finish! With a grand and dramatic flourish, she whipped her completed quilt top victoriously in the air, and watched it settle flat to the floor. 

    Suddenly, the sound of her own desperate screams pierced the silence and everything faded to black!

    Sound like the beginning of a bad quilt mystery story? Or is this plot all too familiar? The fact is, even the most experienced quilters among us can make BIG mistakes and just keep going until they are buried deeply in a quilt.  It usually happens when you are moving sections back and forth to the design wall and for some reason the mistakes are invisible until you post your proud creation on your favorite Facebook group. 

    Don't despair, and don't put your hard work away in a drawer-- we're going to fix this together! 

     This is the Fat Quarter Shop's FREE "Star of Wonder" Christmas project-- (which I am still grateful for, by the way.) Before this even happened, things started to go badly with the pieced borders-- I will warn you about that. So usually when you start adding final borders, you measure your sides. Since these borders are pieced, I didn't. So a huge piece of advice here, do measure your center and tweak the cutting of those long strips, pieces C and D on the Week 4 instructions. I had quite a bit of "easing in" to do. So by the time I got to final assembly, it was already "The Star of Terror" in my mind and I should have taken a break.

    But I didn't, so here we are. Back in the day when I was a naive fool, I probably would have to reverse engineer the entire quilt by taking it apart to this level to fix the block:

   But I'm going to show you how this is all that is needed-- yes, it took an extra hour, but it didn't take a whole day!

     First, a bit of quilt forensics is required-- we must return in our minds to the scene of the crime. This is where I went wrong-- at this stage of construction, I flipped the pink unit and sewed it the wrong way to the center star.

    Take a picture of your quilt if it helps, and label all four seams around your flipped patch seams in order of how they occurred after the mistake. My first mistake was the seam next to the star. Then I added the top and bottom rows, and finally the border.

     Back to the present time. We're now going to unpick the seams just around the block and about an inch further-- backwards from 4 to 1. We are going to do this GENTLY. No ripping seams apart. The best way is to just unpick every third or fourth stitch on one side, then pull the long thread away from the other side, then remove all the little pieces of string. Neatness really counts and I can't emphasize that enough. We need to clearly see our edges. If you do pull too hard, other intersecting seams can start coming apart, and you'll need to fix those first, before we starting putting back together. 

     

    Here is my unpicked patch. Once it was removed, I went back, heavily starched, and ironed all the edges flat again, both on the patch, and on the hole you created.  Again, it's really important to keep all unpicked edges neat and flat for re-sewing.

    Now we are going to sew the patch back in, starting from Seam 1 and progressing to 4. Pins are starch are your best friends-- be NEAT people! Here is my seam one-- neatly pinned and ready to sew. (Of course, you're gonna want to make sure the patch is the right way this time, because do you think that has never happened, lol.)

   Fold the quilt neatly to get access to the entire seam, making sure other parts of the quilt won't get caught in. Here is my patch sewn in and neatly pressed open-- one side is done.

     Next up, are seams two and three next to the green strips. The biggest challenge here is folding your quilt the right way to get the seam under your machine and making sure no other parts of the quilt get caught under. It's easy to do with a little patience. Remember, you unpicked this seam slightly beyond the green strips, so make sure the entire seam is closed up again.

     Finally, just the border seam remains.

All is right with the world..

and the star is WONDROUS again!

    All that's left is a set of 4-1/2" white borders-- which I will probably not measure for, hee,hee-- since there is still a good bit of naive fool in this old lady.

    I hope you feel encouraged next time the unthinkable happens-- with a little acceptance and forgiveness of your mistakes, and love for your work, you can soon be on the road to a lovely finsih again!

   Come back soon for the finishing instructions on my "Star of Wonder" pillow-- I'm anxious to have both of these things in the books and ready to start some other project while it's still summer. How is your summer sewing coming along?

xox

Carol