Rogue River rapids

Quite a few months ago, actually I think it was before xmas, I purchased an Accuquilt Go Baby cutter. This little cutter is useful for cutting out quilt block pieces and applique shapes. I purchased it with an eye to using it for cutting out circles and other shapes that are more difficult to cut out quickly. I confess I didn't really buy it for quilting of all things, but I did buy the drunkard's path die to go with it.

I finally had the chance to pull this baby out of the closet and give it a spin this past weekend and rapidly produced hundreds and hundreds of curved block pieces. Hmmm, now to piece them all. That might be the Go Baby's biggest drawback! You can cut out many block pieces quite quickly and get yourself into big trouble in no time.


Now I have this quilt design all ready to go

and lots and lots and LOTS! of curved seams to sew

- can you see where this went wrong?

Yeah, curved seams although not impossible, are more time-consuming to sew and require a bit more care shall we say? So I have been slogging away all week at piecing these little quarter circle blocks and have now pieced around 3/4 of the 280 blocks needed. Yup 280.

I would say that if you have the money to purchase the full-sized Accuquilt cutter, then do so, because you could then at least purchase dies for larger blocks and therefore not have to sew quite so many of them. For example the larger cutter has a drunkard's path block that is 7" finished, or double the size of the go baby's die. The smaller curved pieces are also harder to piece because the curve is much tighter. Something to keep in mind for anyone who is thinking of going in this direction.

A quickie test layout of the progress.

The drunkards path die for the go baby produces a 3.5" finished quarter block, so it will take quite a few to get up to a lap quilt size. But I'm working away at it and cutting out the pieces is a breeze. It wastes less fabric then I would've thought because those cutters are laid out with minimum waste on the die and because you can accordion fold the fabric to cut multiple layers at a time. I also discovered that you can use charm squares (5" squares) and if you lay them carefully on the die, they can be used to cut out the two halves of the drunkard's path block with virtually no waste.

I'll post more on the progress of this quilt later on...

Happy Sewing