Tall Poppy sewalong 6

Would you believe it? I’m still making the snowflake block EXACTLY the same way I did in the pattern. So this post I’m going to talk about two things that have generally made my life a whole lot easier when making this quilt…

The hump jumper

My sewing machine is a bit of a princess. When I come to a lumpy seam using my quarter inch foot, she pretty much refuses to sew over it. Enter the hump jumper. The one that comes with my machine looks like the image on the left below, but they also come looking like the image on the right.

Depending on the thickness of the seam bulk, use one, two or three layers of the plastic under your foot with the option on the left. Each end of the tool on the right is a different thickness so you place the end around your sewing foot that matches the height of your seam.

When you’re joining the flower units to the leaf units, this little tool comes in very handy for sewing over that seam bulk. I just place it under my foot before I begin sewing, it moves with the fabric and then pops out the end of the foot. I sometimes need to put it back if I haven’t quite got past the bulk, but it makes for much smoother points and seam matching.

Squaring up

This one is pretty obvious, but for a long time I tried to make do without buying a ton of different tools to make quilts. Back in the day they would have been made with needle, thread and scissors, but now we need machines, mats and blades and rulers – and that’s just the basics!

Anyway, I finally invested in a square ruler after just using rectangle ones, and boy did it make a difference for finishing off larger units/blocks like these. I can really guarantee my corners are at 90º angles and my opposite sides are parallel which makes things so much easier when putting the whole top together.

And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks so we can do just that!

As always, feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.