At Least 1000

Day 321: I will beg your indulgence for one more post about quilting this week because, as you may have inferred, Double Wedding Ring is undoubtedly the most difficult project I've tackled yet (well, Memory Wreath wasn't easy, but at least the pieces weren't curved). The very thought of cutting out all those little wedges was daunting in itself, but it went surprisingly quickly, and I'll explain why in a minute. Here you see something in the neighbourhood of 1000 ring segments. I needed 960 for the entire project, and cut extra just to be on the safe side. These will be drawn at random from the bin in sets of 12 to assemble into two arcs of six each. After I've made 32 arcs, I will begin piecing them together with the background fabric to form the first four rings (the quilt will be four rings by five). The reason cutting the wedges went so quickly is that I was able to cut 4-6 at a time for the most part. There were a few prints I decided to "fussy-cut," i.e., center the individual piece on a part of the design. I refer to the fabrics I fussy-cut as "character prints." These include specific design elements like cats, chickens, owls, etc. which I want to feature in their entirety. Framing a character can be quite a challenge when you're cutting 2.5" pieces! The remaining segments were cut from "all-over" prints. The "all-overs" can be stacked and cut in bulk with a rotary cutter. Obviously, fussy-cutting takes more time since the template needs to be centered over a particular character. Background, "melon" and solid-colour corners will be cut as they are needed. The serious part of cutting is done and dusted, and I'm on my way to a classic.