A number of years ago, I was learning to write patterns of some of the quilt projects I had designed.  I was working with a lovely woman who had been writing patterns for her website for a number of years.  I wrote my first draft and sent it on to her.  She looked at it and sent it back to me (without markups) and told me I’d missed a step.

Let me tell you, I got totally frustrated over what step I missed.  I went through piecing that quilt top in my head and even went back to my sewing table, duplicating a step that was sort of difficult to write about.  But, I could NOT find what it was that I was missing.

When I emailed her about it and my frustrations and recreations, she laughed at me…then gave me a hint as to what I missed.  I still didn’t get it.  This went on for three or four days and she would give me hint after hint and I STILL couldn’t figure out the error of my ways.

She FINALLY told me that I needed to put a visual in the pattern for clipping your corners.

“What?  I don’t understand, I didn’t clip my corners.”

“EXACTLY!” she said.  Go to your quilt top and run your hands on the front.  If you feel little lumps that you know aren’t seams that you didn’t press in the opposite directions – those are the corners you didn’t clip.

So, I went over to my quilt top and did what she said an whoa, did I ever feel little lumps!!!  Since then, I have read information from licensed jurors or quilt competitions that clipped corners is something that judges really look for.

I then asked her what to do about it because I had never had anyone tell me to clip corners – and she sent me a little image that showed how to clip corners.  Without further instructions, I went and re-made that quilt top…this time including clipping the corners.  Then I ran my hands over both of them and noticed a very distinct difference.  Here’s the same type of image she sent to me, showing me what corners I needed to clip on a half-square triangle (and any seam of a quilt that involved triangles):

Do YOU clip corners?