Now, how did that happen???

Remember when square was a bad word...nobody wanted to be a square. "Daddy-O, you and the old lady are so square..." But, as quilters, we're all about square. So, we make a block and we square it up. Then, we join that into a top and we square it up. And, we add a border and we square it up. And, we quilt it and of course, we have to square it up again before we can bind it. And all that is just to avoid the dreaded potatoe chip border that waves in a breeze.

But, when you consider all the effort we put into piecing a quilt, who wants to have a bunch of little imperfections that will haunt us every time we look at the work. So, we pull out our square up rulers and we square and square and square. But, what I wanna know is how I got off square in the first place??????

I squared every block of that cmas quilt before I assembled it. And, I still had to ease blocks in where I was off by as much as a quarter inch to get them all to fit together. At one point, I thought I was going to have to add strips to get it all to meet up, then I found out there were match points and if I added an extra strip, I would throw off where those match points were supposed to meet. Then, after all the blocks were in rows, I squared it up again. And, when I joined the rows, I squared again. (It's a wonder quilts come out bigger than postage stamps after all that trimming) And, I added the first border, with it's perfectly mitered corners (okay, so maybe trying to match and miter a striped fabric was not the wisest choice I ever made, but it looks TERRIFIC!)

Now, I know I cut every one of those border strips the same width and I know I sewed every one on straight, using my precise quarter inch foot. I expected to have to square the corners after my mitering, just to keep them "perfect", but how did some of my borders come out 2 1/4 and some of them come out 2 1/8? How could I have been off there? So, I pulled the cutting board to the floor and squared up the whole thing to 2 1/8...hey, I ain't pulling out those miters to fix a seam allowance, believe you me! And, I managed to get one side of the outer border sewn on before I ran out of time. Just three more sides and I can post a picture.

And then, I'm going to start some free motion quilting on another UFO so I can get my safety pins out of it. And, maybe I'll get this cmas quilt finished before the holiday (I didn't say which year). But, just in case, I told Rob we may be hanging just the top this year. Who needs more pressure around the holidays anyway?

Man, it's just so groovy to be square.

If only they'd had the internet, they'd have realized that square was going to be cool again. See ya'. Lane