Red Sky at Night Quilt - Getting a Scant 1/4" Seam Allowance

After getting all of my cutting done for the machine pieced portion of my Red Sky at Night Quilt last week, I was excited to dive into sewing! I printed out pages 14-30 from the pattern, and picked through my ziplock bags of cut shapes to get the right pieces I needed for this week's sewing - the units made of squares and rectangles. 

So that I didn't have to keep count of all those little squares as I sewed, I counted little piles of 10 low volume prints. I didn't bother counting navy squares also, because I knew that once I'd used up the cream squares, I'd have the right amount!

The units made of squares and rectangles in the Red Sky at Night quilt are some of the few units that aren't trimmed to size after construction, so it's really important to have an accurate, scant 1/4" seam allowance. 

A scant 1/4" seam is a tiny bit less than a full 1/4". Think the width of your thread, or maybe half a millimetre. It makes up for the fabric you'll lose in the fold when you press your piece flat. That loss is tiny, and inconsequential when sewing a whole quilt of squares together. But in blocks with small pieces, that fit together with other blocks, the loss builds up. 

I experimented a lot with my different sewing machine feet during my first version of my Red Sky at Night Quilt. I found that my 1/4" foot (the O foot on the right in the photo below) gave me a seam on the wide side, and that I needed to move the needle over further to make it scant. My machine (a Janome 6700p) already has a special needle position for the 1/4" foot, and I found that switching between feet for piecing like this, and piecing half square triangles, which needs a flat foot, rather than the 1/4" edge, and then also changing needle positions, all a bit fussy!

My regular piecing foot (foot A in the centre, photo above) has a plastic section that lines up with the 1/4" mark, and my bobbin window does also, and I found using those worked pretty well, if I kept just inside the lines. Then I read this blog post about scant seams by Brittany of Lo and Behold, and followed her recommendation to use my HP foot. I love it! I find it much easier to keep the pieces just under the edge of the foot, rather than guiding under a wider foot but following markings. It's much easier to see what I need to.

No matter which way you approach scant 1/4" seam allowances, I recommend checking your rectangle or checkerboard units after making one to make sure they're accurate. And I recommend using a scant 1/4" seam allowance for any part of the quilt that you're not going to trim down after stitching. Blocks like half square triangles or flying geese don't matter so much because you'll trim them to the exact size anyway.

I was struck again, starting this quilt for the third time, how fun and easy it is to batch-sew the units. I sewed all my light and dark rectangles together in one quick go, then all my squares. The I sewed my skinny stripes and mini 9-patches.

After I was done making all the units, I followed the "You can now sew the following blocks!" step at the bottom of the unit instructions. These 4 blocks below were the ones I could do. It was so easy to essentially sew four 9 patch blocks together from units I'd finished, with the exception of a little extra sewing for the Antique Tile block, bottom left. 

It took me a few hours to complete my machine pieced tasks for the week. And, then I put my leftover squares and rectangles back in their ziplock bags, and printed the labels on page 103 of the Red Sky at Night pattern for units. I started new ziplock bags for the checkerboard and stripe units I didn't use yet, so that they'll be easy to find next time I need them. 

I'm spending the next several weeks going through the Red Sky at Night Quilt step by step. Get quilt block histories and links to all the relevant blog posts and videos in a weekly email delivered right to your inbox! Sign up below!