Dancing Squares and Progress on Challenge Quilt

I have been steadily working away...almost finished my Ruler Practice quilt and also started another quilt. As this is to be a gift, I will not be posting about this one for a while, but wanted to show you the border.

Following Ricky Tim's excellent lecture at the recent Australian Machine Quilting Festival, I decided to use the idea of dancing squares in the border. We had been given a syllabus of the lecture and there were some basic instructions in there for constructing this. Nothing earth shattering compared to some of the other techniques we were told about but such a nice simple idea to highlight a border.

This was easy to construct and came together very quickly...no measuring or trying to be consistent, just putting it together to get the effect of dancing squares. The squares don't even have to be exact...mind you, I did mine at 3in square as uneven squares was too much of a challenge for me.

I did the dancing squares all around the centre of the quilt and the only issue I had was to judge in a roundabout way where the corner squares would sit which was complicated by the fact that I only had limited amounts of green fabric. I have made it all around the centre with about 6in left of the green fabric. This I will need to make a tiny alteration for one of the corners so it looks somewhat consistent, i.e. the squares in the corners in approximately the same spot on all four corners.

This was very interesting to do in terms of letting go of the restrictions around consistency and how things should be done and definitely not something that comes naturally to me, but I really enjoyed this.

The quilt will be super cute and I will be able to show you some time in December. Almost done, just need to put it all together and find a backing.



Also finished my Challenge quilt which I will put up when it is bound and all pretty.

I decided to try the Piano Key border again after having a few hassles with accuracy in the last quilt. Used the Handiquilter Line Grid Ruler for this and this time I started on one end (started in the middle last time...not sure why and that clearly did not work well). As you can see I took the Handigrip off on the bottom for this exercise as it was most irritating when sticking to the wadding. Did just re-attach the grip pieces after I was finished with the border. I love the Line Grid ruler...very nice to hold and easy to handle. As always I had some trust issues in terms of the ruler giving me a definite 1/2in each time, so I had put little marks along the border. Well, after a few lines my marks were no longer correct and I prepared myself for not ending up in the right spot at the corner. So, I literally had to continue blind, trusting that the ruler would get me there with 1/2in to spare before I reached the corner square (the border was 43 1/2in). Well, to my surprise and utter disbelief I made it more or less exactly to the corner in all four corners.

How good does this look? Could not believe it and was very impressed with it. Could not mark this out that evenly, even if I tried. Such a time saver doing this with the ruler. If you are wondering what rulers to get, this type of ruler is definitely worth it!

Karin