Back from the Land of the Lost

Have you ever lost time? An Hour? A Day? A Week?!!! Well, I've been in the Land of the Lost for the past week!! It suddenly came upon me that I needed to step away from quilting, blogging, and a whole bunch of other things to take a wee break. I felt like I had been going in circles, that I was not accomplishing anything quilt wise and my brain couldn't seem to put two cohesive thoughts together in a row! But, I'm back and hopefully the rest did me good! Over the past week, I have looked thru many old quilt magazines and books, slept in, baked some brownies, watched (caught up) on many taped TV shows, straightened one little pile on the sewing room LOL, had a sew day out with the girls, quilted a quilt for a friend; and, yesterday, my good quilt friend Connie called and we went fabric shopping!!!! AND kinda went on a sideways....not quite lost but seen some country back roads....looking for a quilt shop we had never been to before!! We did find it, in the end!

I can't tell you how many crossroads and donkeys we seen along the way LOL but we had a great time just the same! Getting lost in the country in northern Maine is the best place to get lost! The one place we did stop to see if we were anywhere near where we were supposed to be (which we were not!)the lady in the yard turned out to be a long time machine quilter! I mean, really, we quilter's must have quilter radar that lets us find other quilters out in the middle of nowhere!LOL! She gave us brief, really brief directions and sent us on our way!! When we found the quilt shop, the door was open and we went in but the shop owner was "out" working her other job, the shop was "not really" open but "it could be" and her husband turned on the lights and let us shop, cut our fabrics and said come again! LOL! Imagine.....only in the country!!:) I know it sounds like I did alot last week but really, I usually do 4 times as much.

I last posted about inset seams giving me a problem and here is the solution I found to make the pieces go together easier for me.

Here are the directions we were given on how to sew the inset pieces. No matter how many times I did it this way, I always ended up with puckering and yuckiness.




Just when I was about to toss the whole mess in the garbage, it came to me to try sewing the easiest seam first, which is this.....the straight across seam.



I marked my 1/4" down and in and placed pins there.









Here is the block I want to set this piece into.






I laid my piece right sides together and matching up the dots with the seam edge, which you can see underneath. I pinned the two together and sewed from one dot to the other dot.






Now I need to sew the slanted seam. I matched the two edges together, placed a pin at the exact dot spot where I should start stitching and sewed that seam and repeated on the other side.

Now you can see my inset seam with NO puckers!!! Sewing the seams this way means I didn't have to twist the pieces around so much. I can't explain why this method worked better than the directions but it did.




Happy quilting!