Browsing through my emails last week, I stumbled across one from Spotlight which had the magic word – “Discount”! There was a line of Buzoku cotton with metallic gold highlights (a slightly heavier weight 100% cotton) that I quickly fell in love with, and I knew that I had to try designing a quilt with this fabric.
Now, there’s a slight hitch in this plan, I’ve never made a quilt with anything more complicated than plain squares, but with my recent Accuquilt purchase, I was feeling game. The Accuquilt GO! fabric cutter uses dies to cut material exactly to size, every time. Cutting the fabric is my least favourite part of the whole quilting process, mostly because I’m a bit of a perfectionist and it normally involves multiple re-cuts and takes forever.
With this cutter you can cut through up to 6 layers of cotton fabric at once. While it was a bit of an expensive purchase, I think it will be worth it if I do more quilting as a result. I also purchased the 9″ Qube which gives me the option of creating 79 different squares all 9″ in size, and I have been using the Quarter Square Triangle (4.5″ finished square) die.
This was the first time I have used the cutter, and it was quite simple to use. I used a cardboard template that I made to be slightly larger than the triangle, and used the leftover from the first pass to make a second. With one row of fabric I was able to get 14 triangles, and all within about 3 minutes. It probably took longer to square up the fabric and cut the row than to cut all the triangles.
The dog-eared corners from the die made the sewing process a little easier. After a few false starts with the wrong sewing foot, I finally got 4 squares with some good sharp corners. I’m so happy with the combo of light and dark fabrics, but I think I’ll need to put some plain sashing between the squares as the patterns are quite busy when put next to each other. I have a die to cut 2.5″ strips, so I think I’ll use those, but now I need to work out what colour. Perhaps dark grey, or maybe gold?
I’m still finalising the design, so let me know what colour you’d suggest in the comments below, and I’ll bring you some updates in the weeks to come!
Happy quilting,
Meagan x
