On Ringo Lake, Part Six - Taking the Plunge

Part 6 looked like it was going to be pretty easy, but it called for salmon fabric, and I was down to one small piece and one even smaller piece, so I knew I would be needing more. (It may be called "coral" or "melon" where you live, but here in Alaska the name of this color is SALMON.)

(Image credit: Leela Cyd,on thekitchn.com)

The roads were very icy and I only had it in me to go to one fabric store. I could only find one salmon fabric that I liked there, so I bought it and went home to sew, with plans to get more fabric soon. 

The assignment for Part 6 was to cut orange triangles and sew them onto the brown and aqua triangles from Week 4 to make squares. Bonnie gives us two cutting methods. The "regular" method is to cut squares, and then cut them in half diagonally. The Essential Triangle Tool Method has you cutting a strip and then using the ETT to cut triangles from your strip. You end up with triangles with one dog ear missing (which is not a problem). You have to be careful because the cutting dimensions for the two methods are different. 

I decided to use the regular method because it seemed easier. I had used the ETT Method last year and I wanted to compare. (Maybe it's not realistic to try to compare methods a year apart, but . . . whatever.) 

This was going to be such an easy week! One piece to cut, and one seam to sew.The cutting seemed to go fast, though I quickly used up all my fabric.

The sewing - not so fast. I had a fair number of do-overs. I had hoped that I could just whip these out without pinning, but that was not to be. I found that there was quite a thick fabric bump in the middle of the new seam where two previous seams came together. It tended to push my presser foot to one side, so I had to be really careful. 

Another problem I had was at the beginning and end of each seam. The thin points of the triangles tended to slip one way or another and sometimes the seams would be too narrow and other times too wide at the ends. It later occurred to me that trimming off the dog-ears on the leading edge of each piece before sewing the Week 6 seam might help it feed into the machine more smoothly.

After pressing the squares open I had two annoying dog-ears on each piece. I used the Simple Folded Corners ruler to trim off the dog-ears while also checking to make sure each piece was square.  I was pleased that my pieces, for the most part, turned out to be very nice and square and the proper size. I think all the extra effort during Week 4 helped to give me good results here. The SFC ruler made it very easy to check squareness and also to check that the Week 6 seam was centered.

This week turned out to be quite a busy week for mystery quilters. Bonnie Hunter always has surprises for us. I like surprises! Read about it in Parts 7, 8 and 9.

Lessons Learned:

• I like the "regular method" better for making right triangles. I found that all the flipping around you have to do with the ETT tends to make you drift away from a nice 90° angle. I probably wasn't being careful enough.
• I learned from Bonnie that you don't have to (and perhaps should not) make the point of the aqua square touch the Part 6 seam.