Rhonda Dort

Isn’t it wonderful to see your DWR project coming together! By this point in your construction you have:

1. Chosen your fabrics, 2. Secured your templates, 3. Selected your vintage linens, 4. Cut your block centers, 5. Attached your vintage block feature pieces, 6. Cut your Arc fabrics, 7. Sewn together your Arcs, 8. Cut your Small Melons, 9. Sewn your Footballs and WHEW! Can you believe it’s only Jan. 27th!

You have everything laid out in some fashion so you can achieve both a color and visual nice balance and are ready to begin sewing blocks together. I’ve sewn together a lot of crazy shaped quilt blocks together before but never anything close to a Double Wedding Ring quilt top!

You will need a method of keeping your Football shapes in the correct position when moving them from your layout to the sewing machine. I used 4 Flower Head straight pins. I marked them with T B L R: top, bottom, left and right.

BEFORE I remove a Football shape from my design wall, using one of these 4 pins I position them on the Melon piece. The top of the pin indicates the direction of the Football while the letter on the pin indicates the placement with regards to the block center piece. So in the picture above, the top most football needs to be sewn to the left of the center, the Football on the right…sewn to the right side of the block center.

Now…if your Center Blocks are directional, you may wish to create your own system of marking so that when you are stitching you will not have to worry about a center ending up in the wrong orientation.

Carefully fold the center in half and finger press. Do this in both directions, horizontal and vertical.

The Marti Michell templates make a 8 piece Arc making it easy to align the center seam of the arc with the finger pressed center mark of the block center piece. Pin to secure the position of the Football piece.

I used my Accuquilt Go and the DWR Dies to cut my solid arc quilt pieces and was fortunate to have the centers marked already by the tiny little wedges.

You can use just three pins or a multitude of pins to secure your Football piece to the block center. Do what works for you!

You can stitch football side up or melon side up, again find what you’re comfortable with. I chose football up because it allowed me to be sure that the arc seam allowances stayed in the direction they were pressed.

If you are sewing Football side down this is what it will look like as you begin to sew. Remember, begin your stitching at the pre-marked dot from your templates.

Oh I was giddy when I stitched and then flipped my block over and open!

And so it begins! The blocks getting sewn together! This is the first block and the one and only time you will sew together a complete four Football separate block.

From the diagram (thanks Marti Michell) you can see that after that first and only complete block you will now be sewing blocks that have only three Footballs attached to the center. Does this make sense?

The heavy black curvy line above shows how I will be sewing my block pieces together to form a horizontal row.

I have my diagram marked showing horizontal blocks 1-4 and vertical blocks 1-6.

To finish horizontal row one I will sew three more partial complete blocks with a Football shape on the top, the bottom and only the right side.

Ready for horizontal row 2? This time I will sew three Footballs, left, bottom and right. See how I have placed my Flowerhead straight pins accordingly? I absolutely need these markers to keep my pieces positioned correctly as I begin to sew. If you’re like me, don’t rely on memory once those Footballs are lifted from the design wall, after awhile they all begin to look the same! 🤣

Row 2 construction technique is how you will finish each additional row of your quilt top. And you thought this was going to be hard!! Easy-Peasy once you understand and are comfortable with the method!

Happy quilting and blessings, Rhonda