The Continuing St-o-o-o-o-ry

The unsewing has begun:

Four complete middles with their 4 "wings", and 5 sets of 1/2-blocks picked out from top and bottom and paired up again.

During the picking, I noticed some junctions were extremely bulky, with the seam allowances ironed to one side instead of alternating. Even 20 years ago I understood how nicely bulk was distributed if you could "twirl" the seams where 4 corners met. How had I gotten so off track with this top that I couldn't accomplish that?

So, armed with a glass of wine and a fresh attitude (kind-sight, remember?), I put the truncated flimsy back up on the design wall, this time with the seams visible, stood back and took a good look at what I had wrought 20 years ago.

All triangles pressed toward taupe--check!

Not all middles pressed the same way (toward the taupe)--there's your problem!

A quick reckoning showed that there were significantly fewer blocks pressed as the paisley block above--most of them had the middle squares pressed toward the taupe on all 8 seams (diagonal and +). Even though I got a nice twirl in the center, the edges of these few were causing all kinds of problems when sewn to blocks with a different pressing scheme.

All the pinwheels with the incorrectly-pressed middles were placed at one end of the flimsy instead of scattered throughout--hallelujah! I could remove that third and tackle the segment by itself, instead of manhandling the entire thing every time I needed to correct a pinwheel.

That's where I am today, as I examine each junction in each horizontal seam.

Some seams can be fixed with a simple pull of a couple of stitches to release the twirl:

 But others need to have a section of sewing pulled out so the opposing seams can be flipped to the opposite position.

Realigned and ready to be resewn and reironed:

When I started this, I was picking out every bad junction and marking it with a pin, as shown. That soon meant I needed to carefully reexamine the top, looking for all those pins--what a waste of time! Now I resew the seams immediately after the pick-out. Once 2 or 3 rows have been realigned and sewn, I press and starch them, then tackle the next few rows.

The upside to all this segmented sewing is that every time I fix a seam, I put another element of the current Leader-Ender Challenge project under the needle (first mentioned here). I'm plowing through that project!