Scrap Rainbow Double Wedding Ring

Hi everyone! I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We got together with a group of friends and had a great time with delicious food. And games and movie watching too. It's been nice to have a little vacation and some extra sewing time.

I spent most of the last two days working on my quilt for the double wedding ring challenge put on by NYC Metro Mod Quilters, and got it finished around 9 p.m. last night.

 

It's another project made almost entirely from my scrap bags. 

My friends on facebook and instagram cheered me on as I shared progress pics. Here's one that shows the pieced white centers a little better:

 

Sewing all those curves was not easy. I did a lot of pinning. At the beginning, I had to unpick small sections on almost every curved seam, but I got better at it as I worked through the project. I used the Simpli-EZ double wedding ring template and I have a couple questions about it if there are any experts out there reading this. First, I had to change my machine settings to increase my seam allowance a bit so the pieced arcs would fit the little melon pieces. (I usually put my Janome on 4.2 for a 1/4" seam but for this project it needed to be on 4.0.) And then the weird thing for me was that after I sewed on the first arc to the melon, the narrow ends of those melon pieces had a little chunk slightly larger than 1/8" sticking out and I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to do with it. I looked at a couple videos specifically about this template but they didn't show the up close details, just the general construction information.

Anyway, I made it work. I'm looking forward to getting the single arc template and trying another double wedding ring.

The quilting was fun. :D

I quilted a different filler design in each of the four ring centers, flowers in the squares (not easy to see though), S-curves in the melons, and loopy zigzags in the arcs.

clamshells, swirls

 

echoing, pebbles 

I had a hard time deciding on the binding but went with red because I thought it would look good and there is only one red arc in the quilt. And because I had red on hand. I got other good suggestions from friends--I think a dark purple or a black with a multicolor print would have looked great too. I got a little worried about the red after the binding was sewn on by machine but before I had it hand sewn down to the back--it was too much red and I thought I might need to redo the binding. I kept going though and decided it looks a lot better sewn down than it did before that step was completed.