Sunday, May 22, 2011

I Really Need To Read the Directions!

I really need to read the directions sometimes and just stop skimming!

We are having a Grandmother's Flower Garden Challenge at our guild and they gave out little fabric packages.  I got an idea for the challenge and plunged on ahead without reading the instructions.  I didn't want to use the fabric in the package so I bought my own - sigh!

 
 If you enlarge the photo you can see the very first instruction "use all the colours in your fabric pack" - woops!  I completely messed up!  Grrr.

Then I pulled out my book More Elm Creek Quilts by Jennifer Chiaverini since I thought that the quilt was completely cut out and ready to sew - well it wasn't.  I was only about half finished the cutting.  I had cut for Variation 1 and not for Variation 2.  Woops!  If you enlarge the photo you can see the cutting directions very clearly.  I guess I just stopped reading - oh well!  I pulled out my Go! cutter again and got to work with the remainder of the scraps I had set aside a long time ago.


It took a little while - but I just put on a TV show and away I went!  This required that I cut 416 1.5" red squares but I had them cut in only a couple of minutes with my Go!  I love that machine and never would have cut this quilt out if I didn't have it! 

So note to self - read ALL of the instructions all the way through and stop just plunging in head-first without reading ALL of the instructions!  Ok maybe most of the instructions first  LOL!

So what do you all do?  Read all of the instructions or read as you go along?  let me know in the comments - I would love to hear from you!

3 comments:

Rhonda the Rambler said...

I have to be honest...it depends on the situation. If I am doing something like your guild thing I would have read them all. But for a pattern, I rarely read all the way through. Sigh...it has gotten me in trouble on more than one occasion.

Linda said...

I'm a skimmer mostly but I am trying really hard lately to read all the way through beforehand.

Unknown said...

Hmmmm why read directions? Maybe because the author has a few good tips to give you before you make wrong cuts and have to buy more material. I have been known to skip ahead and skim read myself, but like most of us usually make some nasty mistakes because of this. As an author of patterns, I spend hours writing and proof reading my instruction so they are simple and clear to avoid costly mistakes. So before you skip and skim think of all the hard work and time that went into writing a pattern to make a beautiful quilt. I had to learn this lesson the hard way before I started writing my own.

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