Strawberry Pillows, Day 6

Since I was still procrastinating on hand sewing up the Connecting Threads strawberry, I moved on to the patchwork strawberry.  I had about five different shades of red for the main body and about seven shades of green for the stem to work with.  I didn't have any real rhyme or reason when sewing up the patches together, other than to not sew up the same fabric next to each other.

I liked how they both turned out, but my red fabric, when folded in half, ended up measuring only 19"x14".

I needed to make an equilateral triangle, but I couldn't make one that was 19" because one of my angles would come up short.  So I cut a 14" equilateral triangle.

Now remember how I wondered on Day 4 if the 4" "perpendicular to the seam" line would make a difference on a different sized berry?  Well, if I were to place a line of stitching along the seam of the berry where it would measure 4" long, I would end up cutting over 3" off the bottom of my berry!  That's a lot from a berry that's already only 14"!

Instead I stitched a 2" line, which left a little more berry.  Also, with such a small berry, when I stitched up the bottom of the berry, I had to stitch lines 1/2" from the center, instead of the full 1".  It still made for a very narrow box bottom, but that's okay.

I filled the berry then moved on to the stem top.  Because the berry was smaller than the measurements the pattern called for, I had to make an adjustment to the template, too.

Just to see what would happen, I placed the templates on the green patchwork fabric at a diagonal.

I had to make another adjustment to the measurements for this berry, and sewed the top pieces together with (as close to) a 1/8" seam allowance as possible, instead of the 1/4"

I stitched up the seam allowance along the straight lines and the stem, but then I noticed that the stitching came out wrong.

For some reason, even though I had not messed with the tension setting, the bobbin thread was coming up through the fabric.  I checked out my machine to see if there was anything obvious that would have caused that, but I couldn't figure it out.  I finally decided to try switching out the bobbin.  I didn't think it would be that, since there was a lot of thread still left on it, but when I switched to another bobbin, the stitching came out evenly.

I continued on with the next steps and finished up the top without any other problems.

Well, there's nothing left to do except the hand sewing!  Blarg!