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Mystery Quilt Along Clue Four



Hello Quilting Friends,

Wow!  We are on week four already. This week will get us over the peak and around the curve. The unit for this clue is the drunkard’s path. Before you groan and say you don’t like sewing curves, give my methods a try. 

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Method one is the curved piecing. The key is to sew with the concave curve on the top and only sew to the middle of the unit lining the fabric up with the right edge of the quarter inch presser foot. Then do the same with the other side keeping the concave curve (red fabric) on top. To do this you will have to line up with the edge of the quarter inch foot on the left side (most sewing is done by lining up on the right side of the foot.) The ¼” presser foot works really well to get a ¼” seam. When I used the walking foot, the fabric would pull to much making the seam to large. Then the seam ripper had to come out. Watch my video that will come out later today and subscribe to my YouTube channel. 

Method two uses the no tear reusable freezer paper piecing template and no curved piecing. The finished look is a nice radius, made up of several short straight segments. This unit can really help you to appreciate the reusable template. I pieced one unit the traditional way, by sewing through the paper. It will be for demo purposes and I am glad I don’t have to tear the paper out of all the little points. Save those little pieces that you cut off, and use them for A2 & A3 in the next unit. The paper piecing method will use more fabric than the traditional curve seam method.

This week is exciting in that we can start putting some of the units together. Make a 4 patch with 2 Cat’s Cradle units and 2 Drunkard’s Path units. There will be 32 Drunkard’s Path units that we will save for later.

Scrappy quilts are great, adding more fabric is easy and it just blends in with the other fabrics. Looking at older quilts also provides inspiration, like when the same fabric was sewn together to get a piece big enough to use. Another example from older quilts is the use of a different background fabric for a few of the blocks. If previous quilters did those things, then I can use those tricks myself. Have you done something like that to complete a quilts? Have you been shopping your stash to make a new quilt? Or do you need some new fabrics? I appreciate you shopping here to support my small business that has brought you this free mystery quilt along.

Quilting Quote of the day: It always seems impossible until it's done. I hope you learn something new with every quilt you make. The next clue will come out on Thursday, March 11, 2021.

Let’s go sew,

Michelle