What is the best way to catch a cat?   Wash a quilt

Excellent!

Exactly!!  LOL

A minor set back on Inner Cube.  What I encountered ... after the fact, of course ... is a lack of attention to detail.  This is a point where a little hand-holding would have come in handy to prevent my retro-sewing.  :-/

What you see below are the components I am working with: a tiny Tumbling Block, with the "light" segment at 12:00, and the polka dot/stripe star.  The Tumbling Block goes into the center of the star.  My lack of attention to detail pertains to the stripes.  I simply picked up  a Tumbling Block, slapped it into the center and stitched them together.   All 7 of them.

It was wrong.

Since I wasn't paying attention, they turned out like the picture below.    Light segment at 12:00 .... pretty isn't it?  :-)

Yeah, but it's not correct.

 
The hexagon stripe pieces were painstakingly cut so that the division between a black and white stripe is precisely at one of the points, let's call it the 12:00 position.  As you can see the light segment of the Tumbling Block does NOT line up with the 12:00 position of the hexagon ... because I hadn't paid attention to the full color diagram of the finished quilt.

It wasn't until I was doing a mock-up with the pieces that I had, that I realized .. oops ... the stripes on the stars aren't vertical, as they are in the finished picture. Well, dang.  *THAT* isn't going to work at all.  All the stripe fabric needs to be vertical.  Sigh.  Nothing to do but to rip out the Tumbling Block and re-stitch them.  Fortunately, there weren't that many.

Then I took a closer look.   In one orientation, the star has the white stripe on the left side of  center and if you rotate it 180°, the white stripe is on the right side of center.  It may not make a difference but, once burned/twice shy, ya know?  Before I restitched the Tumbling Blocks back into the star, I looked for that specific color combination in the full color diagram and noted *where* the stripes were at the 12:00 point.  And I carefully stitched that specific color combination Tumbling Block with the stripes aligned per the diagram.

The photo below shows a re-stitched star ... and a red arrow points to a white stripe that is on the right side of the center line.

If I had paid attention to that tiny detail in the beginning, this step backwards could have been avoided.  OR if there had been a support group available with some words of wisdom.    But, I'm grateful that I only had to re-do 7 stars and I won't make *that* mistake when I do the stars with white-fabric-and-black-dots.  :-)

Did you ever watch the Anal Retentive Chef on Saturday Night Live?  Carefully read this latest posting of yours and I couldn't help but think of Phil Hartman and some of his routines of long ago ...

Sorry if I seem disrespectful but my goodness, Pirate, this work of beauty you are creating would drive me up a wall and into the nearest rubber-walled looney-bin.

judyinohio said:

this work of beauty you are creating would drive me up a wall and into the nearest rubber-walled looney-bin.

I'm just a couple of steps away .....  LOL!

Actually ... and this is gonna make you literally laugh out loud .... for a my whining and complaining earlier on, now that I really think I have this thing dialed in and figured out (honest!  I do! LOL!), it's *almost* boring.  The shapes themselves were never a problem.  Stitching them together is not going to be a problem.  The "problem", for me, was the initial cutting of the fabric .. I had a very difficult time committing to that.  Cuz, as you know, once the fabric is cut, the game is over .. it's just a matter of assembly.  :-)  When I realized that I actually did have enough fabric, all that anxiety melted away.   

AND THEN .. bazinga! ... The Universe taught me another lesson in humility.  LOL!   Gosh, I wonder what the next Adventures in Quilting wait for me around the bend?  :-)

I find it interesting how the same fabric can look so different by just change the direction the design is going.  Oh I like the look of the "wrong way" block.

Jo

there's a LOT of action and dynamics when the star block is turned askew.  But it would absolutely NOT work for my eyeballs if all of them were misaligned, every which way.

Much like the same way that Pineapple blocks make my eyes go jiggly.  :-)

I know I have my astigmatism corrected with my lenses in my glasses but working with those dots and stripes for hours like you are doing would just make my teeth curl. LOL

My Kresge Kid quilt is absolutely at the furthest end of the quilting spectrum from your super-duper precise work. If  a part in a block of my work on this thing has turned out to be a bit wonky, I have shrugged my arthritic shoulders, said "Meh!" and plowed on anyway. This quilt is not going to be entered in any beauty contest and it is giving me giggles as I make it which is the whole point of this creative effort.

After all, a block that says "I will not talk in class" is not a work of art; it is a work of sentiment (of sorts) in which I recall my worst year of elementary school and hope that that teacher is roasting in the hottest part of  h**l's playground surrounded by angry fifth graders . 

it definitely looks very different with the stripes turned.  glad you found it before you were further down the road.