Tips on piecing your tail section and assembling your quilt top

Welcome to WEEK 5 of our Dragon Dreams quilt-along! 

If you've been following the QAL schedule, you're dragon already has all his/her legs. This week, we're giving him/her a set of wings.

Please watch my video below for this week's tips. I am covering the following topics:

1. My tips for piecing the tail section
2. My tips for assembling your quilt top

Some additional tips for WEEK 5

1. Piecing your tail section

I think for piecing your tail section, you're more than covered by my previous piecing tips shared during Weeks 1-4.

2. Assembling your quilt top

These are my tips for assembling your quilt top:

• Consider re-pressing your sections to make them lay nice and flat.
• Use pins! I like to pin the start and end of my sections first, then distribute more pins in between.
• Fold larger sections in half prior to pinning to find the centers, then match them up while pinning.
• Back-stitch at the start and end of your seams for extra stability of your quilt top.

3. My variation using two birds

A few QAL participants asked for the exact dimensions of the background pieces I used for my bird section, so here we go:

• Cut the required background pieces shown in the diagram above.
• Piece a left- and a right-facing bird block using the larger templates from my Little Crow pattern (find it here).
• Assemble the section shown above.
• Sew your bird section to the top of your Dragon Dreams quilt top instead of an ff piece.
• Trim the overhang on both sides along the left and right edges of your quilt top.
• Finish (baste, quilt and bind) your quilt as desired.

4. Ready for a skinny binding?

And lastly, one tip regarding the binding: The Dragon Dreams quilt pattern is designed for the dragon to “sit” directly on the binding. In order to preserve all the details around the claws, your binding should only be 1/4" wide in the front of the quilt. If you are concerned about loosing your points around the claws when squaring up your quilt (after quilting) or prefer your binding to be wider than 1/4” in the front, you can add strips of background fabric to the bottom and the right of your quilt top. e.g. cut to 2 1/2" to match the spacing to the left of the dragon's nose. Here's an example of a quilt I made with those strip dimensions: