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Off With Their Ears!

1/3/2009

1 Comment

 
With apologies to Vincent, I must say: ears are such a nuisance.

Any quilter who has ever worked with bias squares knows what I'm talking about: those annoying little points that stick out when you press the seam to one side.  Do you just ignore them, or cut them off?

Being lazy to the core, I always ignored them.  Then I started doing my piecing on an antique treadle machine (yeah, it's a hoot!).  The seam gauge is one of those metal bar thingies that sticks up, and the ears don't sail past it smoothly.  What a pain in the you-know-what.

Ah, but then I discovered a positive motivation for trimming my triangle tips before stitching.  For bias squares, it's not such a big deal, since the triangles line up right on top of one another.  But when the triangles are laid crosswise for stitching (think of piecing a long bias strip for binding), I never seemed to align them quite right.

Then I discovered the solution:  just trim exactly 3/8 inch from the triangle points before stitching.  I can cut stacks of them with my rotary cutter.  Voila!  squared-off edges that align perfectly, and NO EARS!

You knew that already?  Well, aren't you just a Miss Smartypants!
1 Comment
Jane Weston link
1/3/2009 08:57:46 pm

Great tip...that's one I'm going to remember...I'm terrible at not trimming them off...and really I should as it does add up to a lot of bulk.

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