After spending all last weekend starching, pressing and cutting my background and backing fabrics for the Skillbuilder BOM (that Alyssa at PileOFabric is hosting), I was anxious to dive into the first 2 blocks: Soundwave and Magnum. I’m always very concerned about my seams being a scant 1/4 inch so that my blocks are big enough. I even went so far to put a piece of moleskin down to mark where I thought my scant 1/4 inch should be since my quarter inch foot is a large 1/4 inch. Well, I took it overboard this time because my scant 1/4 inch ended up being more like 1/8 inch.
Here’s my oversized sound wave
I ended up having to cut almost 1 and 1/2 strips off of my block in order to trim it down to 12.5 Here is the final Soundwave block (or rather my bar graph 
as my son called it).
So my outer strips are much skinnier now than the others.
I do like how my colors look together. Not sure if I want to re-do this or not, I’m afraid I’ll run out of background fabric if I do it over. I’ve already wasted some because I noticed that many of the long strips of background fabric that I cut for later use were not as wide at the ends of my strips as the middle so I had to re-cut them. If I decide to re-do it, I need to decide soon because I had just enough backing fabric(hopefully we don’t need more at the end…) I’m sure that once it’s quilted, it won’t even be as obvious. What do you think?
I enjoyed doing the Magnum much more. I really enjoy it more when my strips can be whatever size I want and I can lay my strips at whatever angle I want–much less to worry about.
So fun to do!
Looking forward to doing the FMQ next week!
February 11, 2013 at 5:12 pm
I really like your color scheme for these. I have mine cut out and ready to sew, but still haven’t gotten to them.
February 11, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Thank you. I’m trying really hard to keep up but the FMQ may be the end of me. It started out great but now it’s loopy all over.
February 12, 2013 at 6:27 am
Don’t give up! It gets much better with practice. If you have tension issues and are getting ‘eyelashes’ on the curves, loosen the tension. I’ve seen the recommendation to loosen almost to zero and work your way to a workable tension. I’m usually between 1 and 2 on a Bernina 820.