Frequently I look for ways to sew patches together, so that they are a little more accurate even if it waste a little bit of fabric and as I was looking at these patches it looks to me like there might be a better way to sew them together, so that you can get more accuracy. I have these two strips sewn together and I did press the seem allowance to one side, because I want this as flat as it can be, when I measure it and cut it into 31/2 inch squares.
I have this 3 1/2 inch wide bloomer, so the first thing that I am going to do is just cut strips off that are 3-1/2 inches wide. So, this is pretty straight forward. I need four of them for each one of the blocks and I am just cutting it, as wide as the ruler. Referring back to our pattern, we have this patch right here that has the dark yellow on the left and the light yellow on the right with the two green triangles on the outside, so what I will need to do is sew the triangles, like that.
So, what I need to do here is to make sure that these triangles line up right and basically, the key to this is to make sure that where you are going to be stitching, where you end your stitching is a quarter of an inch away from the overlap on that triangle. The other way to do this would be to draw a line, where you want it to end up, which is probably a better way, but I am just going to eyeball this and you are lining up your quarter inch pressed your cloth with a quarter inch on the raw edge of your triangle.
Sew down the side and it will open up and how you can tell if this is actually sewn right is that your green triangle matches up with the edge of your bass patch. And, if it does not exactly then you see you can finger press it and re-stitch it on that finger press line, so you mindedly exactly match up, so I could re-stitch or I could just make sure that when I iron it, it gets flattened out.
Now, even there is a extra bulk here, I do not cut this out, because I can use this back part as a base for sewing that together to make sure that this patches is actually 3-1/2 inches square and it will be the right size, when I sew it to the other patches. So now, I just have my other side and I am going to leave this on top, line it up similarly. And, the one interesting thing about this is, as you can see this little dog ear that hangs up here. You can match this two, so you know that is where you want your top part of the triangle to be sewn and then match the bottom one here and I am going to stitch from the bottom up.
When you are sewing a bunch of these, you can change sew them and then fold this up and wind it up to the sides and you can see again that it is not totally perfect. This one is a little bit off, but I am going to iron it, so that it is very close and as long, I mean this is like a 16th of an inch off, but it is within the seem line. I am going to use the raw edge, the cut edge here of the base patch to stitch my cloth together, because I know that, that is 3-1/2 inches wide and this is going to end up fitting better, as I sew it into my cloth. So there is an alternative way to sew that patch together.
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