Wonky rings and frilly rings

Having spent a week contemplating my pile of vintage style fabrics (you can see them here) I decided I needed to make them into a traditional quilt. I have always loved Double Wedding Ring quilts but the urge to make one has always been equally balanced by my fear of curves.

I decided to face my fears this week but I was nervous so I started with some scraps. I copied these templates from a book I own:

and set about cutting out all the little pieces to make one section. It took ages to trace around the templates and cut them out and here's what I ended up with:

As you can probably tell this was not a very successful experiment. no matter how much I press it, my curves are frilly and the squares on the ends don't match up at all.

Undeterred, I went back to the drawing board (otherwise known as google) and found this tutorial on the Frees Spirit Fabric website. It uses foundation piecing for the curves which makes it a lot more accurate.

I'm a lot happier with this version and I learned as I went along. When I was attaching the curves to the central eye shape, I sewed the top seam first and you can see it's a little wibbly. When it came to the second seam I went with a lot more pins and it's come out pretty close to perfect.

Now I'm off to cut up my lovely fabrics and get foundation piecing some curves.