The Violet QAL Week 4 - Piecing Your Sashing

Sorry about the delay in getting this week's posts up! If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen that we had a little bit of an ice storm here in Oregon and our power was out for much longer than I would have liked. Luckily it's back - many people in our city still don't have power and I am just grateful to be warm.


The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting 

There was a ton of damage to our beautiful Oregon trees, so we will be spending lots of time this week cleaning up branches and debris. Luckily there was no damage to our property - our neighbors across the street had a tree fall on a truck parked in their driveway. 


The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting


The night of the ice storm, we could hear branches breaking everywhere throughout the night - it was pretty scary! I have been through tornadoes and earthquakes, but never anything quite like this ice storm. I will be happy if it is the only one I experience!


It's time to add our sashing! While this is probably the most time consuming step so far, it should also be the easiest. If you haven't already finalized your layout, now is the time to do it - use a design wall, your floor, a guest bed, whatever surface you have available and make sure everything looks balanced and evenly distributed.


The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting


Here are some tips for assembling your quilt:

  • There are not very many places where seams are going to line up, so when they do, they are important. Make sure to pin at every seam intersection so that everything stays lined up. I pin a lot more than this, but at least pin at the seam intersections.
  • It is easy to mix things up when you are assembling this quilt top if you don't lay it all out. I would rather spend a few minutes laying the quilt out than having to pick out stitches if I sew the wrong pieces together. 

The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting

When I make this pattern, I like to start piecing the sashing one row at a time. First I do the short vertical sashing that goes between the blocks on the top row, then move on from there. This helps me keep everything straight and I enjoy the process of seeing the quilt come together.

The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting

One of my least favorite parts of quilt construction is sewing really long seams - piecing one row at a time helps because I am not piecing a lot of long seams at once. I don't know if other people dislike this step too, but it is the one step I always dread!

The Violet QAL Week 4 - Kitchen Table Quilting

Tomorrow we will have our last step in quilt construction - borders! We are almost done!

7 comments

  1. So glad you are safe - what a bummer about your trees tho!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! Yes, I think one of our Japanese maples is a total loss. It got destroyed. Everything else will recover.

      Delete
  2. Wow - that is a fabulous layout. Your ice storm photos reminded me of the destroyed trees we had in an ice storm here in SD about 15 years ago. We had no power for about 5 days but many had no power for 2 weeks. Thousands of power poles broke along with the trees. Hopefully your area will recover quickly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh wow, that is awful. It is amazing how destructive ice can be!

      Delete
  3. That is going to be a beautiful quilt when it is done.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! It has been a lot of fun to put together.

      Delete
  4. I tried adding the horizontal sashing in long strips, but this was just too long of a run to keep everything lined up, even with pinning. I ended up taking each square and adding sashing to the side and then the top of each one. I then sewed the blocks together with much better results.

    ReplyDelete

Unfortunately I have had to turn off commenting due to an overwhelming number of spam posts. If you have any questions, please contact me using the contact form at the top of the page or comment on an Instagram post.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Powered by Blogger.