QT1070 inconsistent readings on touch pins
I found a solution which stabilized the readings.

What I ended up discovering with the QT1070 chip is that you can in fact set a sensitivity threshold for each individual pin.  The sensitivity has to be a value between 1 and 255 and can be set like this:

Wire.beginTransmission(chip_address); //  0x1B
Wire.write(38); // adress for pin 6
Wire.write(200); // sensitivity value between 1 - 255
Wire.endTransmission();


The SeeedQTouch library has a function called setNTHRForKey(value, key) you can use to make this step easier.