Stitchin' Away

Yes folks, I'm still here.  I've been busy stitching on blocks for a sample quilt for the shop and it's slow going. Or maybe I'm just slow.  :-)  There are thirty blocks and each of them has a flower applique.  The original pattern called for dimensional flower petals, but when the fabric order came in, instead of fat quarter packs (needed for the pattern) we found we had fat eighth packs.  Uh oh. After some thinking, I figured out a way to do the flowers with the smaller sized fabric pieces by using a new shop tool:  an Accuquilt GO! Fabric Cutter.  

I'll show you some photos of the cutter, but first I want to give praise to a simple little sewing helper that made doing the eight-point star blocks much easier.  It's called Clearly Perfect Angles, and it clings to the bed of your sewing machine.  By keeping the front point of the block centered between the black and green lines, it's easy to stitch from corner to corner without having to draw a line to follow.  

The cutter made it so much easier to do the flower petals and center.  No more tracing on the back of fusible web, ironing, and then hand cutting.  Of course you do have to iron the fusible web to the back of the fabric, but the GO! does the rest.  

Here I'm getting ready to cut a circle for the flower center:

I just scooted the die up to the roller, turned the handle, and voila!  A perfect circle.   In the next photo I show the fabric cut into sections, ready to stack and cut into three petals.  

Here are some finished blocks (each one is different):

After ironing the flower pieces in place, I button-hole stitch around each piece with brown thread.  I have nineteen of thirty blocks done.  Wish me luck!  Oh, the fabric line is called Urban Cowgirls by Moda fabrics.