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 correct. This is especially important for version A, to make sure the colours are in the same order in all the blocks. In my sample version above, that means the yellow strips are on the right of the pink blocks, and the dark blue ones are at the bottom of the blue blocks.

The seams can be pressed open or to the sides when sewing the blocks into rows. 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. For the third row, press them back to the right, and so on, 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.

Finish the quilt top by sewing the rows together from top to bottom. Give everything a good press, then edgestitch around the whole quilt top 1/8" from the edge to secure all the seams.

The most important bit for this week's steps 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!