Week 6 - Quilt Tops

It's the last week of the Bar Code Quilt Along!

It feels like we only just started, but time flies when you're having fun. I hope you were having fun and your quilt top is coming along nicely and looking like you imagined it.

This week it's time to assemble the quilt top.

This step is pretty straight-forward as you are assembling the blocks into rows first, then sewing the rows together.

Lay out your quilt blocks on a design wall, spare bed, or on the floor before starting to sew, to make sure you have the layout correctly. This is especially important for version A, to make sure the colours line up the same way in all the blocks.

The seams can be pressed open or to the sides for this step. If you press them to the side, alternate sides with every row so that your seams will nest when you sew the rows together. This means in the first row, you'll press all the seams to the right, for example, and for the second row you'll press them all to the left, switching back and forth like this for all the rows. This allows the seams to "nest" or "slot together" when pinning the rows together and helps to keep everything lined up.

The most important bit for this step actually happened last week, when we trimmed the blocks. It's definitely possible to sew them all together untrimmed, but for a crisp result without puckers and strangely wavy seams, trimming them all to the same size is essential.

When lining up the rows, you'll notice that the only seams that actually line up are the seams between the blocks. This is why I said it's not quite so important if your blocks end up a tad smaller than the pattern says, as long as they're all the same size. The bars also do not line up from block to block. You can see in the close-up below that the blue bars extend up and down past the yellow and pink bars, so you don't need to worry about lining them up.

And don't get confused with the sashing seams when lining up the blocks, it's easy to accidentally move over but you'll notice it pretty quickly when the rest of the blocks in a row don't line up anymore :-)

Make sure to post your work in progress and finished tops to the Instagram hashtag #BarCodeQAL so we can all see it!