Publications

Man am I tired. It has been a rough couple weeks working long hours to get magazine publications done. EQ through me for a loop and put me into a spin of overtime. A word of warning, make sure the amount of pieces you have in your blocks use quilting equivalents in size.

Here's what happened. Many of my blocks used an odd number of pieces and I selected a normal size block (12"). From that point on it was a disaster. Some of the actual sizes you would need to cut would fall into the 32nds and 16ths. But, EQ kindly rounded up to the nearest 8th. Pay attention to your screen when you set sizes. There are little circles that give EQ permission to round up. There is no way to get away from it. It rounds up to either the 1/6th or the 1/8th. In my case, I was working so quickly I didn't even take notice of that selection and several of my pieces were rounded from a 32nd to and 8th. I just assumed I would select the size block I want to make and EQ did all the math.

True to a certain extent but, not close enough in this case. One might think that all the pieces are calculated the same and sewing a 1/4" all around would go together and only change the size of the block. Not so. Some of the sections in the block didn't need rounding off so the sections that did round off didn't fit with the rest of the pieces.

The quilt that was the worst had a star of eight diamonds in the center with diamonds coming out from it in all four corners. When you put 8 diamonds together that have been calculated bigger than needed, it just doesn't work.

Unless you know how to work your math, the only way I see around this is to draw the block out to the sizes you want your pieces to be. That way you can give EQ an exact block size to work with so there will be no rounding of cut sizes.

On top of that, I was using a sewing machine I don't normally use when piecing and had trouble keeping the seams a 1/4".

It wasn't a complete loss, just took a lot of overtime to work it out. I managed to get the three that go to QW completed and shipped.

The one for QN that I didn't think I would get done, went better than I expected. I had to reduce the size of the quilt and the quality is a bit less than I'm used to doing but, I did get it done and sent in on time.

All in all this past few weeks have been not-stop working but, the fruit of my labors is well worth it. I can hardly wait to see how they are photographed for the magazines. One in particular is my favorite quilt and even though I usually give all my quilts away, I just may keep this one.

Til next time, Happy Quilting!