Double Wedding Ring Quilt Along

**We gathered all of the Double Wedding Ring posts in one page.  If you want to review a past step or start your own quilt you can all of the posts here.**

So far we have cut.  We have sewn.  Nothing has been hard at all…RIGHT??

Well now we are starting in on where some people get intimidated.  There really is no need to feel intimidated especially for those of you who have ever sewn a garment before.  For those of you who haven’t…You can do this!!

I have a round little tote that is perfect for keeping all of my supplies….right now you only need the melon backgrounds, the wedge rings and pins…LOTS ANDS LOTS OF PINS.

You’ve heard me say that I don’t pin much.  There is an exception to the rule and this quilt is it.  I pin A LOT.  On this day, I was in the car on a road trip with Hubby driving.  I grabbed my tote and pinned away while he drove.  This is an excellent project for TV watching too.

Pinning is really important.  If you marked the middle on the curves of the melon, now is when you are going to use that line.  If you didn’t no biggie.  I don’t mark the line.  For me it’s just as easy to fold the melon in half and stick a pin there.  See how I did that in the picture below?

Now open the melon.  Leave the pin in place.  Lay a wedge ring over the top.  Match the seam line of the middle of the wedge ring to the pin.  Lift the pin and pin the wedge ring in place.

Now match up the corners and pin them in place.

Then go back and pin at each seam line.  YEP…seven pins for one piece!!  That’s why I said LOTS OF PINS.

So first one pinned…only a b-jillion more to go.

After my car ride I have quite a few pinned….

Now- time to head to the machine and sew them….In the photo below you can see that I am chain piecing.  These chain piece just fine.

The important word to remember is EASE…we need to ease everything through.  These aren’t pieces that you “power sew”.  You can see that I start with the piece at an angle.  See how the end is quite a ways to the left?  That’s the way to do it.  Rotate the piece as you go forward watching to avoid puckers.

…and YES, I do go over my pins for this.  Feel free to do what you want.  I go over them as I am sewing so slow.  The chances of me damaging anything is minimal.  In most projects I would not go over the pins.  In this I do. Try it for yourself and do what you prefer.

Keep your quarter inch seam allowance as you ease the piece through.  Here I am at the end…ready to start another.

Keep in mind that there are puckers…and there are PUCKERS.  Don’t fret puckers like you see at on the middle segment.

These make no never mind unless you are making a show quilt.  I flipped it over and the tiny pucker is barely noticeable.  Once that is ironed, it won’t be seen.  The blue melon has stretch to it and makes slight imperfections unnoticeable.

Now it’s time to iron…Lay the piece on the ironing board like this.  The seam naturally wants to go towards the center blue melon.

Let it go that way.  I put the iron only on the pieced wedge ring.  I glide the iron along making sure to press the seam in place.

After I’ve ran the iron over the pieced wedge, I put the iron over the entire piece.

Ironing is important in this project.  As I said before there is a little “give” in the background fabric…press slowly.  That “give” can work for you…or work against you.

The back of your piece should look about like this.  In mine one seam is flipped.  This is no biggie.  None of these seams need to match up with anything later so it’s okay as long as the seams lie flat.

Here’s my stack of ones to this point…

I didn’t count them yet.  I do know that I need to have 220 of these.  Oh my.

I’ve been making a commitment to work on this at least 15 minutes a day.  I’ve been meeting that most days…a few days, I’ve been doing a little better than that.

I’m at retreat right now…I did take this with but I took a couple other projects too.  Hopefully I can make some good progress on a couple projects.