I am making a quilt that has drunkard's path blocks dispersed throughout the top. I saw the quilt in a shop in Walla Walla, called "Stash". They didn't have the pattern for sale, so I looked it up after the trip. It was a quilt designed by Natalie Crabtree called "Mix and Mingle". And it was so modern and cute that I knew I just had to make a version of it. When I say version, what I mean is that I like improv and intuitive placement instead of blindly following a pattern.
Anyway, here is the process I used for the drunkard's path improv blocks.
Stack the two colors together, right sights up. Cut a gentle curve with a rotary cutter about 2/3" away from the left edge. You can see the ruler below is at about 3.75" on the 6" square.
Switch the two pieces so that the light color is matched up with the darker color. Place a pin at the center of both pieces.
Line up the pins and pin the pieces together with the concave (or inny) piece on top and the convex (or outie) piece on the bottom.
Using a glue pen, gently glue the pieces together from the center towards the edges.
Sew a scan 1/4" seam. Try to sew slowly to make sure that you don't get any wrinkles in the top piece.
Press towards the outside of the block. You'll get two blocks, with the colors opposite of each other. Since these are improv blocks. you can see that they don't match up like they would if you used a pattern. That's the reason why they start with oversized squares.
Trim the blocks to the correct size. I needed a 5" block and I started with 6" squares. First, line up the ruler on the pie, or inner piece and trim both sides.
Turn the block and trim the outer edges.
And its just that easy to make an improv drunkard's path block.
Great tutorial. thank you.
ReplyDelete