Are you a pinner? I’m not referring to the online program. I’m wondering if you pin your seams before you sew? I’m a neat freak when it comes to most things and neat seams falls into that obsession. On this quilt, as with many others that I work with, I pressed all of the seams open. Typically when working with seams pressed this way it’s not really that big of a deal to keep them open when sewing rows together. With this pattern all of the seams are staggered which means you can’t simply match up the seams on the top strip with those on the bottom, pin it then stitch away.

When pinning this project I had to be alert for seams both on the top strip and on the bottom. After very carefully inserting an insane number of pins, and stitching the first three rows together I got extremely frustrated! No matter how careful I was the seams on the bottom flipped! I got so tired of opening up my stitching and coaxing the misbehaving nubs into place then stitching them again.

Finally I got the idea of running a basting stitch along the raw edges to temporarily limit the movement of those little buggers. I know it seemed like a lot of extra sewing but it’s either that or messing around with the other way. I figured what the heck! Let’s try it. I cranked the stitch length up to 4 and put the petal to the metal. There was no need to be careful in where the stitching line fell as long as it was between the outer raw edge and the normal 1/4″ stitching line. Mind you, I was somewhat careful not to make it super wavy.

Once again I pinned the two rows together but this time I didn’t obsess about pinning each and every seam. This time I used a much more reasonable quantity of pins; enough to help keep the edges stable while gliding them under my presser foot. I couldn’t wait to sew my first seam using this new process. When I finally made it to the end of the strips I quickly clipped the threads and flipped the strips over. EUREKA!!! It worked! Every single seam stayed just as it should be; neatly pressed open with absolutely NO flippers! :o) Yay! This meant the remaining seams should fly by much quicker which would mean I would finish Mr J’s quilt top much quicker.

One by one the remaining rows were stitched together. With that process finally complete the only thing left to do was to make one final pass with my iron over the seams. Within no time I had the pressing complete.

I stretched the quilt out on the floor for one last chance to admire my handiwork and take a few photos. As I stood there scanning past all sixty blocks I was so pleased with the outcome and so amazed at how quickly this quilt top went from start to finish.

Well, that’s as far as I can go on the quilt for now. Time to add it to my pile of quilts to be finished.

So what do you think?