Spinning till I’m Dizzy!

Yesterday after returning from the dentist, I sat in my chair at the sewing machine, and fed 4-patch pairs through.  I seriously quit counting.  I had counted them when cutting them, so I mindlessly watched each pair go through the machine, under the presser foot, to be followed in a long chain by umpteen thousand more.

I wrote about how I cut them all with my Accuquilt Studio HERE.

There is a kind of zen feeling in mindless tasks like this, the only thing I had to be careful of was that I was feeding ALL my pairs with the red squares leading, and feeling with my fingers to make sure that those center seam allowances were butted up to each other nice and tight.

I’m not a pinner by nature….I’m quite lazy about it actually, and if I can pinch it with my fingers to hold, I don’t bother with pinning unless I’m trying to match sharp points on triangles.  But straight butted seams?  Just hold them and let the feed dogs take them through!

Oh yeah, and see that duct tape on the machine extension table?  I had to tape it up again because the glue didn't hold. *SIGH*  But it's okay -- my new one also arrived yesterday!  I'm going to take the broken one to a glass shop now and see if they can fix it good enough to use it as a spare.

After the 4-patches were all sewn,  the REAL chore began!

Does this look like it could possibly be 480 4-patches?!  Well it is….all kinds of fabrics here, if it was red, it went.  It might be a plaid, a geometric, a stripe, a floral, even a few Christmas fabrics found their way in here.  Boy am I glad to put some of this stuff to good use!  By the time a fabric is cut to 1-1/2”, and finishes as a 1” square…there isn’t a lot to see ON the fabric really, just color!

I laid a length of 4 patches down my ironing board…snipped it from the Mother-Pile ---and began to chain press.  Flip, press, flip, press, flip, press --- all the way down the chain.

When I got to the end of the ironing-board-length chain….I snipped them apart.  And one by one, I picked them up and spun the seams on the back like this:

Why do this at all? Because!  Because these 4 patches will be butted up to each other in the block and this will help eliminate some of the bulk especially when working with small units.  I’d rather be able to butt a seam when joining units than press seams open and have to pin everything – remember, I’m a lazy pinner!

Good thing I had netflix playing mindlessly in the background---It took a good movie’s worth of time to get it all done!

If you want to know more about how to spin your seams, check out this previous post I wrote HERE.

The one big thing to remember…is if you are going to spin them at all, make sure they spin in the SAME direction, either clockwise, or counter clockwise, but NOT BOTH!  And this is determined by feeding all your 4 patches through the machine the same way.  If I started with the red square leading, I needed to keep the red square leading on ALL the pairs.  If I fed one with the neutral square leading --- it would make THAT 4 patch spin in the other direction. If it spins the other way, the seams won’t butt when I go to join it to the next one.

Here they are!  All 480 of them!  Oh this is going to be a fun quilt!