March is National Craft Month – Let’s Talk AccuQuilt

March is National Craft Month and many of the crafting companies are celebrating with special sales and product releases. For the Month of March, I would like to feature some of the products available for quilting.

I often think of my grandmother and how amazed she would be to learn of all the improvements and advancements made in the sewing/quilting industry. When she made squares, everything was cut by hand with scissors. She often sat at her kitchen table, listening to the TV and cutting scraps into squares for quilts. Her hands were riddled with arthritis but up till the day she passed away she would sew or crochet with them.

The Accuquilt cutters and dies have made my life much easier since I purchased them. I started with the GO cutter which is a manual crank cutting machine and the middle sized of the three Go cutters Accuquilt carries. (There is also a Studio cutter that is a crank machine.) I purchased mine last August 2019 and the first die I bought myself was the 4″ Kite Block on Board die. I did write a blog about making this quilt, Journey To Making a Periwinkle Quilt a while back.

I purchased this cutter used and it came with three dies, the value die, orange peel and circles. To be honest, orange peel probably would not have been a die I would have purchased right away, but because I had it, I decided to try my hand at it. What I did learn from cutting with the die was how much easier cutting and sewing curved pieces really could be.

As the holidays ushered in I started picking up various dies and also purchased the electric GO Big. For me, getting the electric cutter was a smart move. My hands and shoulders ache from arthritis and the electric model saves wear and tear on my joints. I highly recommend this model if you suffer from arthritis or have shoulder issues.

There’s so much I like about the Accuquilt system! It makes the cutting so much faster and accurate and for all those curved pieces and curved quilt blocks that I avoided through out the years. But now they are much more possible with Accuquilt.

Pictured above is the Dresden Plate Die. The above die offers the curved blades and the wedge blades. Over the years, I have made three Dresden plate quilts. Cutting those blades by hand is a chore! Also, when I’ve cut them with a template by hand, the template doesn’t have a marking point like the Accuquilt die has designed into it. Those little points makes lining the blades up for sewing much easier. Which in turn makes my plates lie flatter without wonkiness or ripples.

And because each blade is cut with a die, they are all the same size. As I was sewing the blades together, I noticed my plate was not buckling or wonky like so many of my plates were in the past. The picture below has a top row of Accuquilt cut blades and a bottom row of blades that were cut from a template.

Here’s some more pictures of the cutting process with the die.

This next Dresden quilt is not going to take as much effort as before. The cutting and sewing is going along much quicker and easier for me.

As you can see, the above pictures plate is laying flat verses the plate pictured below is wonky and rippled at the center.

The purple and green plate is an extra one from a quilt I made 22 years ago. (Yes, I hold onto things.) I always wanted to make another one but have not been unable to find these fabrics again. (Below is the quilt. It has been well loved. Fabric is faded and there’s some rips in places.)

I’m very thankful to my friend that introduced me to the Accuquilt system last year. I had no idea it existed. It has made it possible for me to do quilt blocks I only admired and it’s made it possible for me to easily continue sewing quilts even with my arthritis. I’ve focused mainly on curved piece dies and how much easier they are to cut and sew and I also want to mention that cutting and sewing the straight pieces is great too! If you would like to learn more about Accuquilt and what it’s all about, visit the website at www.acccuquilt.com.

Is there a curved piece block you’ve only dreamed about doing? Let me know which one you like by commenting below. Thank you for stopping by my blog today. Have a wonderful week!