Late night problems

In all the years that I have sewn, you would think that I would have learned to not sew precision piecing late at night. Last night I thought I would relax a little by sewing, so I sewed a few strips together to make the nine patches for the quilter's academy sampler. Things seem to be going OK, got the first set done and then sewed the second set. Pressed all the seams OK (hind sight is that I did not check the seams and sets for accuracy, before I cut the segments). The pieces did not come together at the seams. Now the nine patch is not a hard block to do, but it does require the piecing to be precise so ALL the seams intersect properly. At first glance I thought that the set with the blue, pink, blue set was the wrong size. But in examining the sets the culprit was the pink, blue, pink set. In the pictures you can see that the 'pbp' set in an 1/8" short and the center strip in not an inch like it is suppose to be. So I had to re cut the strips and resew the pbp set again. A good example that veteran quilters make mistakes.

At first glance it look like the bottom set is the wrong size. But the top set is the pbp set and it is the one that is 1/8" short. The little loop or bump on the bottom is the result of the set being longer that the top set. there is no way that these two sets are going to lay flat and match the seams.

This picture shows the seams when I lay the sets flat the right seam is an 1/8" off. I have the left set of seams butted up exactly the way it would be sewn.

Here is the pink, blue, pink set under the ruler. It only measures 3 3/8" it should be exactly 3 1/2".

This is the blue, pink, blue set. If you look at the 3 1/2" mark you can just see the color difference between the background and the blue piece of fabric. The important thing is that it is exactly 3 1/2" long and the center strip is exactly 1".

Till later