I'm working on a Zig Zag Quilt for the ORB/ParkCityGirl Quilt Along this time hosted by Amy. Check out the cool group & instructions on flickr. I picked 15 fabrics, 5 of which have stripes. Lots of frustration (ie cursing) ensued in my hot hot sewing room last night as I tried to assemble my blocks. The stripes were going every which way and I HATED it. So much so, I almost scraped this Christmas gift to be. But alas, I have beat you quilt. I figured out your game and to save anyone else suffering from this predicament and surely myself in the future; here is how to do it so that stripes align:
Here are two of my squares, pinned in the center.
Draw a line on the diagonal of one block. Rotate the second block 90 degrees and draw a line on the diagonal of the second block. 
Sew 1/4" on each side of the line. Cut squares on the diagonal with a rotary cutter. Press, snip, etc. (I haven't gotten that far yet, nor are my blocks exactly square at this point!)
Ok, now take your newly cut half square triangles from one block, separate and open them up like so. 
Take your second block, separate the half square triangles, and pair each one up with the ones you've already laid out. So one half square triangle from the first block will match up with one half square triangle from the second block.
Now the best part is you can rearrange the squares very easily so that the print can be vertical or horizontal. Vertical wavy lines in the photo below.
Same blocks just rotated so that the light blue fabric has horizontal wavy lines. I prefer this one over the one above.
My next obstacle....we'll see how it goes. 
Just make sure that you rotate 1/2 of the blocks 90 degrees. I have 6 blocks, so I need to remember to rotate 3 of them. I'll have to make sure to do this when I'm not tired.
Hope this helps someone out there.
3 comments:
Oh, I can see that being awfully frustrating to get right! Thanks for making a little tutorial for us!
Oh, Swedish, this is a great tute on working with stripes!
As for one way directionals, like your ship/anchor/wheel print - the only thing I can think of to really make that work without a lot of waste would be to use the same fabric on either side of that row. Like if you paired with red on both sides, then you could flip those HST's around at will and hopefully be able to come up with them all going one way. I don't know if even that would work, though.
I don't think your fabric would look bad if some of them were flipped around, though. From a little distance, it's going to be fine, it's only up close that you would notice the ships and flags were sideways.
Keep us posted as to how this works out for you! Again, nice tute!
Awesome! This is going to look Fab! Can't wait to see more.
Cheers,
Dionne
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