Thought I'd show you a problem that I was having trying to make some bias stems for a few leaf blocks.  I top-stitched the stem across the square and then I needed to square it up.

 Here is where it jammed in the sewing machine and got all twisted.  I kept thinking that there has to be a much easier way to do this, so this is what I came up with.

I sewed a long strip of the straight-of-grain stem across a larger square (corner to corner on the bias).

Then I cut the squares out of that piece of fabric.  Trimmed from one side, turned, and then trimmed the other side to get the size I needed.  It worked great.  Frustrations over!