Quilt 52: Sawtooth Star Poppies - and a lesson I may have finally learned...

I'm well along the way with the "Sawtooth Star" quilt I mentioned last week.  Yeah, it's looking pretty good.

Now, there's one problem with this design.  The two green fabrics, when directly up against the poppy print, tend to dampen down the brightness of the poppies.  You wouldn't think that would happen, but there you are. So I opted to insert a half-inch frame around the poppies to separate them from the green:

So all is good. Or is it?!?!  NO!  Have a look at the picture below.

How this happened, I just don't know, but it's happened to me before.  In the photo above you can see that the green triangles segment is just about 1/4" too short!  I promise you that I cut the patches out VERY carefully, and did follow the cutting instructions from the design software.  But... for some reason... a sometimes it's ended up just a smidge too narrow.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.  Maybe I was pulling slightly as the on-the-bias edges went together.  At first I thought I might have pulled the pink edging on the center block, but no... it's exactly 5 1/2", just as it should be.  I just don't know.  But this has happened on quilts where I wasn't sewing on-the-bias edges.

Well - here's the lesson for me.  Calico does tend to have a little "stretch" going one way.  Along the selvage (woven edge), there's no "give" at all.  But pull the fabric at a right angle to the selvage, and yes... there's a little stretch there.  Not much, mind you, but a little.

So, what I'm finding is that it pays to be mindful of that stretch (hm... is there a name for it?) when cutting out, and line it up so that the stretch runs along the edge you think might be the most vulnerable to being "off base".  In the case of this Sawtooth Star, that would be the edge running along the center block.

So, I've put the stretch as you see it below (I added the yellow arrows to show where the stretchy edge is):

Now, when I join the edge to the center block, I've got a little bit of "play" if I need it.

There's definitely a "happy ending" here, because doing this definitely worked.  Here's the proof:

The first block came together nicely - so did the 11 others.