My Quilty Disappointment

[I have some pictures from the Quilt Expo this weekend, but this post was pretty much ready to go, so I thought I'd post it first.]

 

I've talked before about my aspirations to finish an older UFO in between starting new ones. (I've made three new projects in a row...) And I've also spoken of my love of Tula Pink's Neptune fabric. And I think we should also be honest about projects that didn't turn out quite right and display our quilty flubs to the world. This post brings all those things together.

In a time gone by, in days of yore, I had two honeybuns of Neptune and I had Kona Tarragon yardage to go with them. I got it into my head to try and make Missouri Star Quilt Company's Summer in the Park quilt, which uses a jelly roll. (Video here.)  And eventually, Jenny did do a recap of Summer in the Park using a honeybun, but alas, it was too late for me. FYI the folks at MSQC have fantastic video tutorials, so I highly suggest you visit their website or their youtube page. (They also have a great Deal of the Day, every day!)

The Summer in the Park quilt uses the tube method, so you sew width of fabric strips together and then sew those sets into a tube by sealing the long edges with a 1/4" seam. Then you use the 45 degree line on your ruler set on one of the side seams to cut out triangles that unfold to become squares. (This might make a lot more sense if you view the youtube tutorial :))

Alas, alack, my seams weren't right and/or I did something wrong in the cutting, but when I line up my blocks, they do not make a nice diamond in the center. They're totally off, but not enough to look intentional (because they weren't!); they just look bad.

Egads, I can hardly look at these things!! They definitely have what some might call, "the faraway look": the farther away you are, the better they look :)

I just checked my seam allowances and WHOA DOGGIE! They are all over the place - from about 1/8" to 3/8".  Yeesh! You can't tell on these photos, but that fifth strip is about 1/2" longer than the other four. What's going on there?! I can't remember when I made this, but Neptune came out in the fall of 2008, so it was probably around then. Not so long ago that I was a complete novice and I should have known better. But I was over-eager and mistakes were made.

So I don't know if I should sew them together in a centers-be-damned fashion or let them continue to languish in the land of misfit blocks (or strips in this case - I have 9 strips total). Of course, none of my quilting is particularly precise but this is a bit ridiculous. I could flip them around and do this:

The strips still don't match up, but with some rigorous quilting, perhaps it won't be so bad...? Or I can off-set every other block by a half a block and I come up with this:

I'll have to reflect on it. And in the meantime, I'll start a new project :)