Double Dutch - Revised

Have you ever bought a pattern and later found out there are pattern corrections?  Have you discovered those corrections when it’s too late to do anything about it?   

Well, that happened to me with Double Dutch.

I bought the PDF pattern from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Co. and merrily went about constructing the quilt.  I might have discovered the errors in the pattern if I read through the whole pattern before starting.  I might have found out if I had made all the components at the same time.  It might have jumped out at me that the size of the half-square triangle squares were a different size than the four-patch squares.  But then again, I probably would not have noticed they were different.  

I made all the blue four-patch units first, then pieced them into triangles and pieced those triangles into the large half-square triangles.  Then I made the yellow half-square triangle squares, pieces those into triangles, etc.  So it wasn’t until it was time to trim the large half-square triangles that I noticed they could not possibly be trimmed to the same size.  Uh oh.  What could I do about it?  It finally dawned on me to check for pattern corrections and sure enough, there was a mistake in the initial pattern printing (and apparently in the initial PDF patterns).

So, Carrie Nelson provides several options for fixing the problem depending on where you are in your quilt construction.  The only problem was that I was already beyond all of those points.  If I wanted to fix the units, I would have a lot of un-sewing to do.  Or else I would have to completely re-make the units.  I didn’t have any more of either fabric, so that option was out.  I want to give this away as a Christmas gift, so I didn’t want to rip them out either.  Hmm.  What then?

I squared up the large half-square triangle squares as best I could – they blue and grey squares are ½” smaller than the yellow and grey squares.  How did I fix the different size squares?

The solution was to not make the flying geese units, or to make any combination where the blue units matched up with the yellow units.  I put the blue units together in squares, then the yellow units in squares and added different size sashing strips so the large blue blocks became the same size as the large yellow blocks.  Now it looks like the blue and yellow blocks are “floating”.  

I tried to make lemonade out of lemons and even though I didn’t end up making the design I wanted to make, the intended recipient of this quilt doesn’t know what it was supposed to look like, so all should be well.