AccuQuilt Christmas Theme Blog Hop Winner!

Good morning everyone and congratulations to the winner of the AccuQuilt Christmas theme blog hop as determined by Random.org.

Vicki said...I am now a follower. What do I like about your site? First off the give-away, second the instructions for the apple core quilt, and also the saying you have about ups and downs being with needle and thread - very nice. I would like to use it.

Thank you so much everyone who entered the giveaway and thank you to everyone who said such kind things about my blog.  I truly wish I could give everyone something.  I enjoyed reading all your comments and hope that you will continue to follow my blog.

Merry Christmas and happy stitching,

Nancy

Accuquilt and the 4 x4 Diamond Die

 I decided in order to justify the purchase of my Accuquilt GO I would make a quilt from each of the dies I have purchased using the pattern that came with the die.   I have already made an Applecore quilt so for my second quilt I chose the 4x4 diamond die. I bought this die thinking I would use it to make one of Kaffe Fassett quilts from his book Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts but that's another story.

I went through my stash (because thats another part of this challenge to use only my stash fabric) and found all of the yellows and oranges I could.  I stacked them and cut 4 1/2 by 11 inch pieces.

I placed  them on the Accuquilt die and cut diamonds. I can't believe how fast the cutting goes using the GO.
I cut the leftover corners into 2" squares to use later.

This quilt has 2" strips between all of the diamonds so I got out my 2" strip die.  Just look how quickly I cut the strips and they are perfectly straight.

The first step is to sew a strip to the end of each diamond.

Then you sew the diamonds into rows. When I laid them all out on my design wall I found I needed 94 diamonds the pattern called for 88 must have been a misprint. 

Another problem I ran into was when I sewed the strips between the rows to assemble the quilt.  I started sewing the long strip to the bottom of the row but it works better if you sew it to the top of the row.

When pinning the rows together you need to match the strips on the bottom of the diamonds to get the correct design.

I think this is a pretty cute quilt even made from scraps and leftovers. It just needs some pretty borders to finish it off.                                                                                                

Borders Added and Quilted.

I Joined GO-Ville

I really tried to win a GO on the blog giveaway's but no luck -  so I asked for one for Christmas.
Christmas afternoon while everyone was watching football I took it out to  see if I could figure out how to use it.

One of the extra dies I ordered is the Apple Core so I decided to make a scrappy Christmas apple core quilt.
After all it was Christmas.
Well,  the cutting was a lot of fun and I just kept cutting those apple cores until I ran out of scraps.

 All I can say is thank goodness I ran out of scraps!
The cutting may be easy and fun but sewing all those curves are not.

I tried pinning them together and didn't like sewing over all those pins - so I got out my trusty Elmer's school glue and tried gluing them together at the ends and centers.
I quickly got tired of that and went back to the pins because I think it was quicker.

Not one to give up I kept pinning and sewing and glueing and sewing.
I now have this great apple core quilt which I really like.
I am going to do a curved binding since I like sewing curves so much..