The Methodist

Although I call myself a Unitarian, my work habits on making these 388 HST's has developed some fine tuning. So I'm all about methods. I mean, a quilt pattern reads, "Make 388 light/dark HST's." Then, you are on your own!

What I learned, when I'm making so many with the Omnigrid right angle ruler, is to stack up FOUR of the 3 1/2" wide strips so that I'm cutting two pairs at once. Nobody mentions that. You hafta figure it out for yourself.

And I like to stack 5 of the doubled pairs to carry them over to the sewing machine from the cutting table so that I know that that stack will be 10 HST's when sewn. I chain piece them, one right after another, to save thread.

But here's another methodist finer-point that I learned today; ALWAYS stack the DARK ON TOP OF THE LIGHT at the cutting board!!!! This way, when you are finished sewing them in chains, they go right to the ironing board oriented in the correct direction for the dark to be on top for pressing to the dark side.

If you think I'm nit-picking, just look at the way I did yesterday's with the one turned wrong way around. I had to cut it out of the chain to be able to reverse it. See what I mean?

The green one on the far right is upside down for pressing to the dark!
Another little trick that I use is to keep my count straight at all times. I count and recount my set of ten completed units, so that I'm sure there are ten on the pile. Then, the next ten units are placed kitty-corner on the pile for a count of twenty. I build piles this way until there is a stack of fifty units in the pile and then I start a new pile. More than fifty usually gets too tippy and you don't want them to all fall over. So here is a row of HST's that are four rows of fifty-unit stacks for a total of 200 done! yippee!

Here are the two 50-unit stacks of the 16-patches all done! Wheee! Now to do some more of the HST's.