Oops!

Hello everyone!

This is a follow on to my post on making mistakes here. In that post, I wrote about stitching a block upside down my Fussy Cutting Forest quilt (more about this quilt here, here and here) and having to unpick twice. Guess what, I made the same mistake with a different block! But I came up with a much quicker fix, so I thought I should write about it, if only to help me remember for next time.

I was joining a unit on to the main quilt. Before joining, the units look like a hexie flower with brown triangles on each point and a large green hexie either side.

I work holding the right sides of the pieces together, meaning I am looking at the backs most of the time. So after stitching the bicycle unit on, I flipped it over for a quick check before grabbing the next unit.

And... it's upside down. You can tell by comparing the boat hexie to the compass and house hexies in the surrounding units.

I quickly decided I couldn't just leave it wrong (it is always worth asking myself that) and then briefly panicked about the idea of undoing all the stitching I had just done. Like I did last time. Which would be annoying as I didn't have enough time to undo and redo that amount.

But then I realised that only the central boat hexie being upside down mattered. I didn't have to undo it all, I just had to undo and flip that one hexie.

So I did. I unpicked that one hexie. I had previously removed the paper from it, so I rebasted it. And stitched it back on the right way.

It was a bit fiddly, especially towards the end. Flat back stitch would probably have been easier than whip stitch for this repair, but the whole quilt is whip stitched and I didn't want to change for just one hexie in case it looked weird.

And here it is, the right way around!

So my tip for the day is take a moment to work out the minimum you need to do to make a mistake liveable, before you start unpicking. It will save you lots of time and hassle.

Thanks for reading!