Keeping Myself Humble

Making assumptions that turn out to be 100% incorrect certainly has a way of keeping one's ego in check. If I ever begin to think I know it all, you can be sure I will goof up sometime soon and have to eat some humble pie.

Today's humble pie comes courtesy of an assumption I made with regard to Lake Effect. Yes. A project I have worked on for over two years has been all wrong from the very beginning. And I have only just realized it because this week my effort was to finally sew the EPP sections to the center panel I recently finished appliqueing. See pattern front below.

Careful counting of EPP rows indicates that on the horizontal sides of the center panel, I should have four (4) full hexies and itty-bitty partial hexies at the top and bottom. Now look at this picture of my project to see how far off my reality is from the pattern. My partial hexies are NOT itty-bitty.

For quite awhile, I could not figure out how I'd gone wrong. Then, I surmised that I certainly must have used the wrong-sized hexies. And that is exactly what I did. Acckkk! All 70-bajillion of my hexies are smaller than what the pattern calls for. 

Good grief.

Having had no significant prior experience with EPP, I was unaware as to how these are measured. The pattern calls for 3" hexies, and mine measure 3" from tip-to-tip. BUT, the way to measure hexies is not by the full length, but by the side length. Hmmm. 

Of course I could have completely avoided this dilemma had I not been so cheap. In an effort to save myself a few dollars, I opted not to buy the kit (which contained all 70-bajillion correctly-sized templates) offered by the designers, Minnick and Simpson. Had I done so, all would have gone together perfectly fine. My frugal thought was that it was wasteful to buy templates that would end up being thrown out after this one use. I could make my own out of cardstock that I already had on hand; the only investment was just my time. As I was in no great hurry to finish this quilt (I've often referred to it as a 10-year project), this seemed entirely reasonable to me. Ah, well, live and learn.

Once I had figured out where and how I'd made the mistake, my dilemma was to figure out how to rectify the situation. I believe I have a solution. Hopefully the pictures below will help me explain it clearly enough.

I pressed under a quarter-inch on all sides of the panel. Then I centered it onto the hexies that will surround the panel. Above you see the panel is pinned on; my next step it to hand-baste them together. Then I will hand-stitch - almost like an applique stitch - the panel to the hexies.

Take a look at the reverse side, which shows not only how far off these hexies are from what they are supposed to be, but you can also see that I've removed many of the templates. I will remove the remaining templates around that opening, then do the stitching. Then I will cut away all the excess, leaving a quarter-inch seam.

This seeming setback leaves me undaunted! I will eat every bit of my humble pie this afternoon as I baste these parts together.

I am confident that my quilt will end up looking very much like the pattern and I will love it just as much as I did when I first saw it. Mine will simply have smaller (and more) hexies than the original. No biggie, right??

*heavy sigh*

I would like to think that I have learned my lesson about making assumptions, yet I fear that probably I have not. Somewhere along the line, it is likely to happen again.

I am linking up to share my mistake with the party-goers at Kathy's Quilts and the Slow Sunday Stitching link-up. 

Happy Quilting, Friends!