My Secret Garden with Brenda - Week 1

I am drawn to bright colors so when I saw the Riley Blake fabric for this Quilt Along, I asked Marcia if I could play with it!  The pattern from This & That was just as appealing so I was eager to get started.  

After reading through the directions for the first block, I decided to cut it out using my Accuquilt Cutter.  With my cutter and Qubes, I find that it is easy to convert many traditionally cut and pieced patterns to be cut more quickly and accurately with Accuquilt.   

I began by looking at the cutting instructions for the larger pieces of the block.  The 3 1/2” X 6 1/2” flying geese units could be cut with the #4 and #5 dies from the 12” Qube.  That is also where I found the 3 1/2” square which is the #2 die.   

The smaller half square triangles used in the pattern are 2” half square triangles that finish at 1 1/2” so that makes use of the #5 die from the 6” Qube.  Let me show you how I cut those out.  I cut a strip long enough to cut 8 triangles from each fabric that I needed.

The I placed them RIGHT sides together on the die.  You can see from the next photo that I used a permanent marker to make lines a quarter inch from the edges of the blades to help with lining up the fabric. 

Then I fan folded the strip across the die so I was cutting out 4 layers of fabric.  You can cut up to 6 layers of quilting cotton with your Accuquilt cutter, but since we need 8 of each shape and the die has 4 triangles on it, this made the most sense! 

After running it through the machine, I had all of the pieces I needed for those 8 half square triangles!  Since they already have right sides together, the units are all ready to sew.  Then I repeated the steps for the other combinations of fabrics. I did use colored pencils to color in my pattern to help with placement of the colors.

When piecing the half square triangles, I pressed to the gray units and the green units.  This helped with accuracy when assembling the units together.  For this inner section of the block, I pressed seam allowances for the squares in alternate directions.  Then I pressed the seam allowances for the rows open to help reduce the bulk.  I use a shorter stitch length (1.8) when I plan to press open.  All pressing for the block is done on my wooly mat. 

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