Off on Various Tangents - First Up, An Epic Fail

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It's been a frenetic couple of months...no finishes.

When I last left you I was working on an orange peel quilt. Well, the rows are together, but now they're hanging in the studio closet and I've moved on.  It became painfully evident that there was something seriously wrong with this Missouri Star tutorial/instructions/template from the get-go, and that these peels were not going to touch unless this was sewn together with something like a 5/8" seam.  I went so far as to use a 3/8" seam and call it a day. Maybe from a hundred feet away it will look like a 'real' peel.  Maybe if I had done this as a raw edge applique it would have worked, but no way in Hell was using their template, stitching to a fusible interfacing with a 1/4" seam, turning, and fusing to a 5" square going to yield points that met. It's my own fault for not measuring and double checking those instructions before I started.  I know better. 

By my calculations, if you used 100 wt. thread, sew a super scant 1/4" seam, use the thinnest featherweight fusible interfacing you can find, then the turned peel would measure just a fraction over 5-3/4". The diagonal length of a 5" square is 7". If you use a quarter inch seam to sew your squares together you've still got over a half inch of space between each peel--hmmm...not what Missouri Star represents in their videos and stills.  And I didn't use 100 wt. thread, my fabric wasn't all that thin, and I used regular fusible, so my turned peels measured 5-5/8"(sigh)  All I can think was that was a lot of EXPENSIVE French fabric. C'est la vie.  When I'm over the fact that it's not going to be a real orange peel -- the perfect quilt I thought I was making with the fabric I had saved for 5 years, and just some cute little 'posey' quilt, I'll go back to it. In the meantime, I'm seriously considering appliqueing a million little circles in the center of every set of  'petals' to hide the fact that those damn 'peels' don't touch.

Until then, you'll excuse me if I mutter curse words whenever I see Jenny Doan 'teaching' someone how to quilt.