the joys of folk art quilting...

As Shasta said in her comment. That's exactly it. Now I certainly DO NOT profess to be any sort of expert on these type quilts, or these particular quilts. All I merely wanted to do was have fun making my quilt while sharing my experiences along the way. How I made each block, what worked, what frustrated me, what drove me nuts...and most of all, how I solved all the boo-boo's. I'll also say that I almost did not write this post either because I really didn't want to upset or scare anybody any further by announcing that my pieces weren't fitting together. This is just how mine turned out. Not every ones may do this! Plus...It's going to be solved so that you will never know it ever WAS an issue!

By now you know that I am a serious Cheri fan. I have one of those plastic magazine holders in my craft closet stuffed! with all my little manila brown envelopes, but sometimes the measurements can be a tiny bit iffy. On a small wall hanging I work around any instances of that and none the wiser. But on a big quilt like a sampler that you've already sewn into sections it can get a little hairy. So tip for you...don't! Seriously I might have gone back to having the single blocks if I *could* go back.

Actually truth is I will most assuredly be taking out my trusty graph paper and graphing out the ABC sampler sections just to make sure it all works out. Buggy Barn might do that for me...they did just that for the first section!! We got a lovely drawn out **measured** drawing in the mail from BB of how the top would work out! How cool!

So back to working...one thing that always seems to trip me up are the template sections. As Cheri states...template pieces do not include seam allowance (s/a). Well sometimes they need a s/a around the edge and sometimes they don't. It hasn't turned out consistent for me. The USA did... the basket was perfect... the flag under the eagle needed s/a on the top and bottom, but couldn't have s/a on the sides or it wouldn't have fit for me.

This above is what I saw when I laid out my two halves of the bottom section. First I knew I needed to connect the lower right angel/ oakleaf/bird to the top with the template stars and angel and bird the in vase thingy. It should have lined up perfectly. You'll notice it didn't quite. No biggie, sew on a strip and be happy. Once I sewed that seam, I could turn over and sew the remainder of the flag seam. Second issue came to light. The flag is supposed to be the same length as the right side section. I've measured everything and all the backgrounds and pieces are all the correct size. I suspect again that the culprits are the flying geese in the center, but mostly the star blocks. I wondered when making them, but they matched up to the lower parts and fit together beautifully then so I never gave it a thought. Then I laid out the left section. Problem..too short. In fact the right section in Cheri's quilt has a strip sewn on the bottom to make it the correct size to match up to the left side. Well my left side as you can see is shorter without.

**Now again, You may never face any of these issues, but I did and this is how I plan to solve them and what you have to consider when doing so*** Mostly, how does adding strips effect the size as it pertains to the other sections. Length is no big deal. Width however is a big deal especially since I have the top section totally completed. Before I sewed this I laid it out as you see below and pinned the other two top sections over it to make sure they fit. They do fit luckily.
Rather than having all these strips at the bottom, I'll shift the sections like below.

I plan to make a line of hst's to fill the gap over the snails' trails and put a small section under the flag. I think it will look just fine. I haven't a clue if I did anything different than the pattern or not but it doesn't matter at this point. Notice I did not say "wrong". Nothing in folkart is wrong in my eyes. This makes this quilt mine. I'm happy with it now, so I'll be thrilled when the tops done...extra sections and all.