Hi friends!
Today in our series, A Quilter’s Alphabet, Tammy and I are exploring the letter D. I have 3 terms for you today: Quilt Design wall, dog ears and Drunkard’s path block. Let’s get right into the terms!
Be sure to read to the end to check out my sale and current surprise!
Quilt Design Wall
A quilt design wall is a vertical surface where you can layout your your pieces to be made into blocks, your blocks to be made into quilts to see how they look together. A design wall can be something you have fixed on your wall, it can be something you pull out when needed.
You can make a a light, inexpensive quilt design wall made of foam insulation covered with cotton batting! I talked about quilt design walls in this post.
There is also something called design boards. What are these? They are portable boards that one can use to set up a block for piecing and then bring over to the table where you sewing machine is.
They are super helpful for keeping pieces where they are supposed to be! And if you return the sewn units to the board, they make it easy to transport- back to the cutting table for trimming, or to the ironing surface for pressing, or to the design wall for placement!
I talked about how to make portable design boards in this post– super easy using foam core boards, cotton batting and duck tape!
Dog Ears
What a silly name! Dog ears are the long points that extend past a seam allowance after pieces are stitched together. A great example is when making half square triangle units, or any unit where you are sewing triangles together- because when you are sewing triangles together, there will be excess bits at the corners in the seam allowance.
Trim these little bits away to reduce bulk and make your next step in piecing the block easier.
Drunkards’s Path Block
This block has curves! The basic block is a quarter circle in a square.
One side of the block has a concave curve and the other convex- want to know which is which? I explained that in this post!
Of course, the block can look different depending on how much of the square is showing!
The finished quilt can look different depending on how the blocks are placed. This is my quilt that was in the 2019 Quilter’s Planner- Drinking in the Sunshine. I used a drunkard’s path block with other pieced blocks.
New pattern with an alternate setting is coming soon! And a new template as well!
Don’t forget to check out the quilting terms starting with the letter D that Tammy is explaining for you!
Next week in the Exploring the Basics series, Tammy and I will be discussing the Square in a Square technique!
happy quilting!
Kate
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SALE!!!!
The post office has announced a temporary price increase – each 1st class package goes up $0.25 and priority mail goes up $0.40 from 10/18/20 to 12/27/20.
So here’s a sale – Buy One Item and Get 20% Off Another item (good on up to two items per order- lower price is discounted).
Plus, there are more PDF patterns coming.
AND…
November and Thanksgiving is a time of year to celebrate those things and people we are grateful to have in our lives. As a THANK YOU to my customers, any orders placed during the month of November will include a bonus goodie. It might be an extra pattern, it might be a FQ… you just don’t know what it might be!!!
Thank you to all my readers and customers for following along!