One block done!

After finishing the hand piecing on the half square triangles for my Civil War repro UFO, I used a sewing machine to complete the block since my hands are too old and sore to do that much hand work anymore.

Unfortunately, I ran into problems when working on the machine that I keep in a cabinet in my LR (the only room in our house that is warm at all this time of year), a Bernina 170 that I just never bonded with, and after yesterday's experience, I can see why, since the presser foot pushes the top layer so much that the blocks ended up 1/8" off at the end of each seam, however I didn't want to use a walking foot since it's hard to get an accurate 1/4" seam that way.

I decided to finish sewing the block on the Pfaff 1473 that I have set up in my son's old BR since I love its built in walking foot and that worked much better, but in moving the pieces upstairs halfway through the project, things got turned around and I had to not only rip out one row, but also the blocks in that row (photo taken after I'd done some unsewing).

I also discovered when using a seam ripper on those pieces that even though this fabric came from a quilt shop and is supposedly part of the Harriet Hargrave collection (at least the dark prints have that written on their seam allowances), the light fabric frayed so badly that I hardly have any seam allowance at all left in one area.

I finally managed to sew the block together properly, though, and it's now on my wall with the 7 other CWR (from now on my abbreviation for Civil War Repro) blocks that I made sometime in the past. 

Think the main thing I learned from this experience, other than to not use my Bernina 170 for piecing, is that I shouldn't wait so much time to complete a project in the future since I'd probably have sewn the pieces together properly if I'd kept on going back when I'd gotten into the rhythm of this block. Oh well, one new block down, 16 more to go...