Pin What?

While doing some research for my post about quilt borders, I read something that changed my {quilting} life. It is a page of tips for quilt borders by Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville (probably best known to modern quilters for her Scrappy Trip Around the World tutorial). Her tips are extremely helpful for getting borders right, but it’s the part she wrote about easing in fullness that clicked for me:

Sew your borders to the long sides of the quilt first, pinning the centers and the ends and easing where necessary. If the border seems bigger than the quilt top, stitch the border to the quilt with the border against the feed dogs. If the quilt seems a bit bigger, then sew that on with the quilt next to the feed dogs to ease it in a bit. {Border Hints and Tricks by Bonnie Hunter}

Basically, she’s saying that the fabric next to the feed dogs gets eased in when you sew…I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a half-assedhearted pinner. I pin to match points, but when I’m sewing straight edge to straight edge, I just line up the ends and go. Often, though, I get to the end and my pieces are a hair of a fraction of an inch out of whack. It’s not a lot, but it drives me crazy. I know I just squared that block up to a perfect 12.5″ and I know that sashing piece is cut to precisely 12.5″ so WTF? (My sweet niece Emma thinks that stands for Where’s the Fun?)

Well, now I know WTF the problem is – that damn easing in!

With Bonnie’s words on my mind, yesterday I pinned every single seam on a quilt top I was piecing, points or not. And guess what? Zero out of whack ends. All matched. All perfect. Like a pro.

I have seen the light.