Sunday, January 07, 2007

Pattern Misdirections

I have a gripe today. I'm not complaining about mistakes in quilting patterns. They happen even with the most care taken. You have to follow the old adage (well, maybe not that old) of always doing one block before you cut all the rest of your fabric. Sortof like backing up your harddrive...you should, but how many of us do it regularly? Even after we have a major crash and lose everything, right?

What I'm complaining about is magazines not keeping the pattern corrections up past a year or two. It doesn't take that much space on a website to include cutting directions. It is extremely annoying when you know there had to have been corrections and they just delete them!

The subject of my ire today is Quiltmaker. I had cut the little fabric pieces for the blocks for Snowmen In The Woods in the November/December 2003 Quiltmaker Issue. I was willing to torment myself with a little paperpiecing (and you know how I hate that) because this was so darn cute and thankfully, a wall hanging. I needed to get this done before I started the baby quilt or lose the little pieces. So, I made all the little snowballs. When I started to attach background to the finished snowballs, I discovered that both snowball measurements were 1/4 inch too large. Now, I'm stuck. I don't have more of the White-on-White. So, it's either buy another fabric, or recut all the rest of the background, plus recalculate the sashings (which, I had not cut yet).

I went to the website to see if there were any other cutting misdirections only to find out that Quiltmaker only maintains corrections for 2 years. TWO years?? That's it?!? They still have this magazine for sale in their backissues dept. and they can't manage to keep them up for more than two years?

Magazines survive on resubscribers and I actually was thinking of subscribing again despite my distaste for paperpiecing (which is why I stopped my subscription after 9 years). I don't know if I have the incentive to do that now. But I do know that I'm going through my list of quilt patterns kept from various magazines to make certain I have any corrections.

Here's a photo from Quiltmaker of the final quilt.
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1 comment:

Angie said...

That is a really cute little quilt. :)