Thursday, May 14, 2015

Going to Dresden, Part 1





Not this one, although I've been there and it's lovely






THIS ONE












I recently made several Dresden Plate blocks with my quilt guild as part of our ongoing Charity Quilt project and, while I loved how the blocks turned out, the traditional method of construction was a little fussy for me, involving making templates, tracing around them, cutting them out and THEN getting to the actual construction process. There's of course nothing wrong with doing it that way, but working with handmade templates has never given me my most accurate, or satisfying, results.  And I'm all about instant gratification, or as close as you can get to it when quilting!

Well, what about the Accuquilt Go cutter, my go-to gadget for quick and accurate cutting?

There is, in fact, a Dresden Plate die:


AccuQuilt-GO-Fabric-Cutting-Die-Dresden-Plates-55071-Block-On-Board-Quilting 

But here's the catch:  it's $89.99, making it one of the most expensive dies made. That's just way out of the budget for this underemployed divorced violinist.  (If you're feeling flush, it's available at www.accuquilt.com).
HOWEVER:  take a look at the middle row of the picture of the die.  See those blue shapes?  Don't they look like. .  .




. . .tumbler blocks?
YES.  You can make the petals of the Dresden Plate out of the 4 1/2" Tumbler block die, available on Ebay or Amazon for around $30, PLUS the die can of course be used for it's original purpose for a tumbler block quilt project.

That's what I call cost effective problem solving.



So grab some 5" scraps (or use leftovers from a charm pack), cut out 13 tumbler blocks and meet me back here for the next part of this tutorial!

No comments:

Post a Comment