Product Review - Bottle Quilt

My friend Pat Yamin has been making 'one-patch' quilts for years. She has produced templates for many of the designs and I bought her 'Bottle' pattern and template when I was teaching in Hawaii a couple of years ago. 

I reviewed Marti Michell's templates recently and used some of the same products with Pat's template: 

Quilter's Slip-n-Grips are sandpaper 'dots' with adhesive backing. I put a few of these on the wrong side of each template to prevent slipping as I cut. They are effective and inexpensive insurance.

The other product I used when cutting around the templates is Olfa's 12-inch square Rotating Cutting Mat. Cutting the bottle shape from my fabrics was so easy and accurate.

To help with hand-piecing, Pat's templates have slots where you can mark part of the seam line. I used the Sewline marking pencil to mark the lines on the wrong side of the fabric shapes. This is my favourite marker for this job.

 

Pat's company is called 'Come Quilt With Me', and you will find her books and more than 30 different templates on her website. Not all the templates require hand-piecing. Machine stitchers will enjoy using the templates too. The marking slots ensure accuracy for designs that require starting or stopping 1/4-inch from the end of a patch for set-in seams.

I like using small short pins for both hand appliqué and hand piecing. The pins in the picture are Appliqué Pins by Clover. They are 3/4-inch long and don't get in the way like longer pins. I use a fine, medium length needle and neutral 50-weight cotton thread for hand piecing. I also run my thread along a thread conditioner called Thread Heaven. Whenever I am hand sewing I use this product, whether it is hand piecing or stitching down the binding on my quilts. The thread does not tangle as much when I use Thread Heaven.

I have made the small hand-pieced bottle quilt shown in the picture. I can't decide whether to keep going and make a larger piece or whether to just finish this small quilt as it is. My friend Rose thought it looked more like wine glasses so perhaps I will finish it to be a small mat for a tray when I serve wine at my next event.