Winding Ways Quilt

Hi friends!  Today I want to share a quilt I finished earlier this year called Winding Ways.  I started this quilt in July of 2023.  Around that time, I had mentioned to some friends that I wanted to get better at curved piecing.  One of them happened to have an Accuquilt Die Cut machine + dies for the Winding Ways pattern.  She offered to let us all use it, and well, here we are!

This was my color palette.  I got all of my fabrics (including my backing and binding fabrics) at Harmony in Provo, Utah.  It's one of my favorite shops (and lucky for you, they have an online shop!)  They have tons of fun gift items, yarn, and apparel fabrics.  Their quilting cotton selection is a bit on the small side, but every fabric is beautiful and unique!  

In a moment of insanity, I decided to "go big".  Why?  Why did I decide to go big?  I hadn't even made a test block.  I just dove right in.  And to be completely honest, I regretted that decision every step of the way...until it was finished, haha.  Every step was tedious.  I didn't enjoy it.  But I persevered and now I'm really glad I did!  

 

There isn't a pattern per se, just the dye cuts.  So, unfortunately, I don't have any information about fabric requirements.  But I do know, I did a 10 x 12 block layout.  So 120 blocks with 12 curved pieces on each one.  I chained pieced everything, so every step took a long time!

When it came to the quilting, I knew I wanted something circular to complement the quilt pattern design.  I found some inspiration pictures, but they all seemed to be custom quilted using curved rulers.  I didn't want to pay custom quilting prices, so I took it to my awesome long arm quilter, Jen Ostler.  We found an edge to edge pantograph called Hippie Dippie that was really similar to my inspiration pictures.  Jen tweaked the pattern a bit to make the design overlap a little and it came out perfect!

As many of you know, Jen always quilts a little object into the quilting for a fun game of hide 'n seek.  This time it was a cute little butterfly which you can see above.

I bound it in this striped woven fabric.  And I'm a little obsessed with this beautiful floral fabric I used for the back.  It tied everything together perfectly, don't you think?!?

The label is from Ever Emblem. I've been getting labels from them for years!  I get the 2" cotton, fold-over, sew-in labels.  If you want to get some for yourself, you will just have to pick one of their basic cotton labels and customize it from there.  I machine stitch my binding down around it because it's hard to hand stitch through it (but then I usually hand stitch the rest of my binding down to the back of my quilt).

I'm really happy with the way this quilt turned out!  I love the colors and the quilting.  But I kind of wish I had picked colors that went better in my house.  I don't know where I'm going to put this quilt!

I'm so thankful to my friend for letting me use her die-cut machine to cut all the pieces for this quilt!  So generous of her!  The dies cut out every piece accurately with little notches to show you where to line things up!  I can't imagine doing this project without the die-cutter!

I hope you enjoyed seeing this fun project using the Accuquilt Winding Ways Dies!  I'm glad I was able to get some serious practice with curved piecing.  Tell me, what's one quilting technique that you want to work on?

Thanks for stopping by today!