Sewing outside border to outside pickle dish units

 For the border of the Pickle Dish and Mariner's compass quilt, I designed the pieces to fit around just one pickle and then seam them where they met.  I remembered a cool technique that I learned from Judy Niemeyer on how to piece large pieces together in an ice cream cone fashion.

Here is a picture of my freezer paper template of the border piece.

I marked the seam lines and a few key intersection points and left a bit of overhang on the outside edge to be trimmed after the quilt gets quilted.

Just like the pickle dish units, the mantra is pins, pins and more pins.  I matched the center, the intersection of the pickle pieces and the end pieces and then the seam at the edge.  Then I placed pins about every 3/4 inch.

Then the fun part comes when you put the edge piece on the top and grab up all the fabric like and ice cream cone.  This bends the top pieces to more or less match the bottom curved piece.  

It's quite easy to sew this long curved line this way, by letting the curved piece stay curved on the bed of the sewing machine.

When it was all sewn, the seam was pressed towards the outside edge and away from the pickle dish unit.

I hope these pictures and description of the steps helps you on your next quilt.