Monday, November 24, 2014

Seeing The Forest For The Trees

I've been giving Elizabeth's Stars in the Forest UFO lots of sideways glances and decided that I'd play with it a little bit just to see how the trees in the first border came together. What looked like fairly fast blocks to piece ended up throwing me a few curve balls, so I changed things to my liking. The trees are made of three horizontal pieced strips, which at first glance were going to be very straight forward, but, when I tried making them, not so much.











The pattern calls for the tip of the tree to be flanked on either side by triangular pieces that had been cut from a freezer paper pattern, but even after trying my hand at a few, the best I was getting was this sorry mess. I think that she had cut only the narrowest of seam allowances and, despite trying to sew a very narrow seam, there was only so much room to work with.









I managed to get one that I thought wasn't looking too bad...
















but when I sewed it to the strip below it looked like this. Not good.
















Not to be refused, I decided to change the pattern. After doing a little math I figured out how to make the tip of the tree a narrower version of the two strips below it, and I like it - there was something about the original design that just wasn't appealing to me anyway, so in the end it all worked out. I need 36 of these so time for more sewing....M

2 comments:

Monica said...

Yes, I had a feeling there must be something off with that border. Your redesign looks much better, and seems more logical too. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing now. :D

Chantal said...

Glad to see you have changed the trees. They needed it! To be honest with you, when you first posted about this quilt, I had no idea they were trees until you called it Stars in the Forest. Sorry Fons and Porter but those trees made a very sad forest!!