Double wedding ring test block

Yesterday was a nice day for sewing. Daylight saving started and I just felt like the day flew by. We kind of slept in and had a late breakfast which means late lunch. Yes. At 2:30. It was nice and sunny, but kind of windy and we decided not to go hiking as planned. I thought it would be a great time to take out the double wedding ring templates and start playing with them. It was a brand new package which I got as a present from Katie. It's Sharlene Jorgenson's method of making the Double Wedding Ring quilt which I found demonstrated on Youtube here. The templates are awesome! I only have one rant about the product since in the booklet that comes with it it states that you'll have to put felt dots in the corners of the templates. It comes with 3 small shapes, 3 large arks, a melon shape, and a curved square shape. That's 30 corners all together. The package only includes 28 little dots. No big deal, on one of the arks I only used 2 dots on the side, I'll work it out.

And now the fun begins! I read the instructions and had a little bit of a hard time understanding for the first time, but I thought to myself to make a test block so I can figure everything out. And boy I had my work cut out for me... :) I took out my cheap tablecloth fabrics which I specifically bought for making test blocks and to practice my free motion quilting skills. They're ugly colors, but who cares! I'd cut out the shapes for 2 blocks (I was so enthusiastic), but ended up making only one. The instructions were OK, except they forgot to state if you'll need to use the background, or the arc fabric. Needless to say I started to cut out the arch from the background fabric :) Oh well :) 

I'm glad I've made this block. I made a mistake in sewing the corner stones on the wrong way and when I had to assemble the block things didn't match.   First I thought it was the crappy quality fabric, then I looked at it a little closer and the corner stones were arcing in the wrong direction. Since the directions didn't state which way to sew the piece on I had to take a better look at the illustration and figure out the right position. I had to rip all my stitches out and start all over. Fun! NOT! With this test block my seam ripper and I became best friends. Again. 

Getting over this little glitch I started to sew the block to the center piece and I was quiet happy. My points matched perfectly (not my arc points though...). At the second piece instead of pinning the purple arc on the inside I pinned the pink one. I never realized it until I've sewn the whole piece on and at the corners instead of getting one light and one dark I had two lights next to each other. Of course since I had to sew with the colored arc on the bottom I never looked at it if I had the right positioning. By that time it was 11 PM  so I ripped out the stitches, pinned the piece in the right way and called it a night. This morning after breakfast I got to work again and finished the block. It doesn't look bad, but I'm hoping the actual block with the  nice fabrics will look a lot better. After all my purple fabric is stretching like crazy... but what was I expecting?

It was my first time:

• working from a pattern
• making a test block
• do curved piecing
• using acrylic templates
• using the itty-bitty rotary cutter (18 mm I think)

Anyway... I still really like the templates, even more glad that I've tried making the block  and didn't just dive in head first. I learned my lesson, that's for sure. It's my first time working with a pattern anyway. Of course with all that I did not even bother taking out my good ironing board to press the piece properly so forgive the wrinkles please! Here's a picture of my art piece, enjoy! :)

The right bottom corner was the first seam where the purple arcs had to meet