Nicked rotary blades? No problem with TrueCut Power Rotary Blade Sharpener

Yesterday, all of the blocks for our Square Peg—Round Hole quilt were pieced and I introduced you to the TrueCut Linear Rotary Blade Sharpener. Did you go out and get one? It’s truly indispensable for quilters!

Before we begin to assemble the quilt, I want to mention another rotary blade sharpener: the TrueCut TrueSharp Power Rotary Blade Sharpener. With a name like that even Tim “The Toolman” Taylor would want one! What a great show that was—but I digress.

The difference between the TrueCut Linear Rotary Blade Sharpener I raved about yesterday and the TrueCut Power Rotary Blade Sharpener is that this sharpener will also take care of any nicks in the blade!

Blades are expensive and it hurts my bank account when they get nicked and are no longer usable. The Power Rotary Blade Sharpener will fix those nicks—saving time, fabric, patience and money.

This sharpener comes with everything you need to sharpen your blades including diamond-grit sharpening stones, a rotary blade handler, sharpening oil and a cleaning cloth.

Another fun fact: both sharpeners can sharpen 28mm, 45mm, and 60mm blades!

Now, it’s time to assemble our quilt top.

Today’s first step is to separate the 28 blocks pieced yesterday into 2 piles of 14. Take the 7 circle 10½” x 10½” blocks and place them with one of the piles and take the (7) 10½” x 10½” accent color blocks and add them to the other pile.

You’ll also need the remaining (48) 1½” x 10½” background strips, the 10½” x 10½” background squares as well as the quilt layout I provided in Monday’s post. Rather than make you hunt that up, to make your life easier, you can click here to get a PDF copy or click the picture below.

As you can see from the layout, there are 2 main sections; I’ll refer to them as the upper corner and the lower corner.

While designing and thinking about the layout I decided I wanted both corners to be largely the same but at the same time, have something different to set them apart. That’s why you have the full circle blocks in one pile and the full colored accent blocks in the other pile.

When I pieced this quilt together, I did so row by row. There were only 2 things I worried about:

1.  the placement of the background blocks and

2.  from which pile I needed to take the blocks.

So, begin sewing rows and sew a 1½” x 10½” strip between each block.

Once each row is done, number the row as shown below.

When the rows are completed, prepare the strips that will be sewn between each row.

When I work with strips to divide rows as we are doing now, the ex-military in me comes through: I must have all my vertical rows perfectly aligned.

To do so, I pull out my pencil and ruler and lightly mark on the back of the horizontal strip to indicate where the vertical strips need to intersect:

1.  The first mark needs to be at 10¼” then 1”

2.  The subsequent marks will be at 10” and 1”, respectively.

TIP! Mark both edges at once and mark all your strips at the same time.

Match up the seams of the vertical strips to the marks on the horizontal strips on each row.

Once you have all of your horizontal strips sewn you should have a quilt top that resembles this one:

Now that the quilt is complete it’s now time to get it quilted.

When I delivered this quilt top to my long-arm quilter, Kim Mullen of Eye Candy Custom Quilting I told her that I needed it back quickly. In other words, it had to be done by the time I finished writing this post! As you can see from the next picture, she delivered on schedule!

Thanks for following me all week. I’ve had another fun week writing these posts.

Using fabrics from Banyan Batiks Lustre collection really made this quilt pop.

But what really made this quilt project fun and easy were these TrueCut tools:

•  TrueCut 6½” x 6½” quilting ruler

•  TrueCut 12½” x 12½” quilting ruler

•  TrueCut 6½” x 24½” quilting ruler

•  TrueCut 360º Circle Cutter

If you don’t have these essentials in your arsenal of quilting gadgets, ask your Local Quilt Shop to get them for you!