My Small World QAL: Part ii of Part 5

Welcome to the second part of #mysmallworldqal part five.  You can find part one here.  Danielle has been leading the way on this section and has two great posts featuring lots of hand piecing techniques - part one here, part two here. 

For those of you who are machining most of your My Small World quilt, I've some tips based on my experience of piecing it.  Starting with the dresden.  I wanted to machine piece this together and to use a machine based quick technique for turning the points on each fan blade.  For this, I took the original template piece (far left in the pic below) and drew round it on paper.  I added a horizontal line across the top of the piece and  a ¼" seam allowance all round the new shape- these lines are  shown in orange.  I then traced this onto template plastic so my new template included the ¼" seam allowance.  Then, cut out your fabric pieces without adding any more seam allowance.  When the top horizontal edge of the blade is folded in half with right sides together and sewn along (like the chain pieced examples at the bottom of the picture, it opens out to form a point the same as produced by the original template but a lot faster!  I then sewed my fan pieces together at the sides and all the pointy raw edges are already neatly turned under!  I pieced my centre semi circle into place as the pattern recommends but you could also appliqué it on top.

 For the piecing of the triangle arc and hexagons see here.  Before I trimmed the hexagons to fit the BF semi-circle  I sewed around the edges using a short stitch length about ⅛" away from the freezer paper pattern piece.   This was to hold the edges together as the hexagons were hand stitched.  

To turn the raw edges on both arcs including the mini inner arc, I sewed a generous ¼" away from the raw edge using a 3.5mm stitch length. This makes a memory line in the fabric which makes it easier to turn with an iron.  I also painted a little starch on to the edges.  Once the arcs are pinned in place and appliquéd on, the stitches can be carefully removed.  This technique is used a lot in dressmaking, especially for hems and I find it really useful in quilting too!

I used appliqué pins to hold everything in place and I did tweak my placing quite a lot.  I cut away excess fabric at the back so the layers aren't too thick.  It didn't quite fit exactly as the picture despite everything being to size and my finished section is a little out of shape but once it is part of the quilt and also quilted, it will all be fine!