The dreaded double wedding ring. 

With one of the worst reputations in the quilting world, the wedding ring quilt design is often said to take way too much time, be notoriously hard to keep from stretching and warping, and this is all before you even START the curved piecing. 

It just doesn’t have to be true though. 

Modern quilting has given us tons of great tips, tricks, and techniques to make those infamous patterns easier, faster, and more reliable to help break down that barrier of hesitation so we can get started and finally knock them off our quilting bucket list. 

If you happened to come across my about page, you’ll know that one of my very first quilts was a double wedding ring, simply because I had a wedding to go to, determination, and a dash of stubbornness.

Now a few years later, I have another wedding that warrants a quilty gift, and decided to go for the double wedding ring again. 

And it’s officially finished! 

So today’s post is two-fold, a little bit of quilt inspiration, and a little bit of written inspiration to answer some common questions about the wedding ring quilt design, as well as show you my most recent finish. 

Is a double wedding ring quilt hard to make?

NO!

I may not have the common opinion among quilters, but let me make my case. 

The three biggest myths that I can find related to making a double wedding ring are these:

• It’s too much work to make the rings
• Stretching and warping of the rings is almost impossible to avoid, making assembly a pain in the butt
• Curves.

But two words solves 95% of those problems.

Paper Piecing.

Use paper piecing to make a dwr

And when I say paper piecing, I mean the easiest, best, beginner version of paper piecing ever. 

The old school traditional way of making a double wedding ring, is to use a stencil to cut out each individual segment of the rings, one by one. 

What makes it more difficult is each segment has a slightly different curve to it, forcing you to use multiple templates, that all basically look identical (but aren’t) when you’re done. 

The organizational skills needed are not for the faint of heart.  

But all of that organizational pain and tedious template cutting is avoided by using paper piecing. 

If you aren’t familiar with the technique, I have a full in-depth tutorial you can check out here.

Paper piecing allows you to batch all of the work and just cut out rough squares instead of perfect little stencil shapes.

As long as you have a relatively straight edge, and the fabric covers the entire section that you are working on, the rest will be trimmed off later. 

Cutting the squares in bulk, 3-4 strips at a time makes the cutting for this quilt go by just as quickly as any other quilt allowing you to make the rings without having to stress about tracing every stencil, cut each one out individually, and keep each segment organized. 

Warping and stretching of the rings

When you are sewing together the small seams of the curves, using pieces of fabric cut on the bias, it is very common to see stretching as you iron each segment out, add the new segment, and move on.

And then hoping that they don’t get pulled our stretched while you finish making the rest of them. 

When your rings get warped, you’ll find that they don’t match up well with the background fabric when you go to complete the blocks often leaving you with pleats and seams that don’t quite sit flat. 

Paper piecing accidentally solves this problem as well.

By paper piecing the rings, you are sewing the fabric directly on to the paper. 

Since paper does not stretch, if you leave the paper on the rings until just the moment you are ready to start adding the background pieces, the paper will act as a stabilizer for the rings.

Since the paper won’t stretch, your ring attached to it won’t stretch either, ensuring your perfect rings stay perfect throughout the whole assembly.

Curved piecing

Unfortunately, the curved piecing is unavoidable.

Part of the beauty of the double wedding ring is the curved rings in them, so I don’t have any tricks for getting out of doing the curved piecing. 

I do however, have TONS of tricks for making curved piecing super simple and make it the quickest part of the whole quilt. 

Related:
5 Tips for Making Double Wedding Rings Easier

I whole-heartedly believe that the curved piecing is only daunting because the rings take so much effort beforehand. 

The rings typically take more time to make than the rest of the quilt, so after putting in all the time to make the rings, it is common to want to be done with the quilt, and instead realize you still have to tackle something out of your quilting comfort zone like curved piecing before you can call it done. 

I also believe that by cruising through the rings so quickly using paper piecing, you are able to keep that quilting motivation much higher and tackle curved piecing head on. You won’t have lost the quilting drive from the tediousness of making the rings by stencil that most quilters face. 

Don’t be surprised if you actually find that once you finish piecing the rings, the curved piecing is actually one of the quickest tasks of the whole quilt. 

How much fabric do you need for a double wedding ring?

As with any quilt, the amount of fabric you need entirely relies on the size of quilt you want when it’s finished.

One of my all time favorite aspects about a double wedding ring though, is that the majority of the yardage you need is background fabric!

I typically lean towards a white or neutral background which often leads me towards the cheaper yardage in the store. Since white will never bleed dye, you can get away with not using the high end fabric and saving a few bucks.

When it comes to my rings, I can never settle on a specific color gradient and always find myself just going with a scrappy look. 

When I had to actually buy colored fabric for this quilt, I ended up buying two honey buns of the fabric collection Cider from Moda which only cost me about $30 in the colors of the quilt! 

Those strips were then sub-cut into squares to paper piece with, and I was done cutting for the rings in a matter of an afternoon.

Two ways to make a double wedding ring

There are two ways to make a double wedding ring quilt, the traditional way to assemble this quilt is not a block based way, but takes your rings and immediately puts you in quilt top assembly mode. 

This way is a bit complicated to put into words, so if you are interested, here is a great visual by Amira at thelittlemushroomcap.com to show you what this looks like. 

The advantage of using this method is that there are less seams in the quilt, especially seams that will run through perfect quilting real estate. 

The downside to this method is that it is a bit more complicated to keep track of, and is an out of the box method of assembling a quilt. You have to wrap your brain around the assembly order which is not seen in many other quilts. 

The second (and my preferred method) of making a double wedding ring, is to break it down into a traditional, (square) block based top. 

I haven’t seen a ton of this type of wedding ring quilt design though, so if you are interested in a written pattern be sure to let me know in the comments section below and I can work on writing it up!

The advantages and disadvantages basically swap from the traditional assembly method for a dwr, so depending on your hesitation for this quilt design, one assembly method may work better for you than the other. 

The result will look almost identical give or take a couple extra seams so which ever way you choose, I guarantee it will be beautiful!

Deciding on a double wedding ring quilt design 

I’m a big lover of free motion quilting.

I can’t and I won’t hide it. 

And I love that this quilt design gives you all the perfect opportunities for free motion quilting. 

I also love that the background area that is available for free motion quilting is segmented by the rings. It’s not just one vast sea of open fabric where I can do literally anything. 

Too much freedom to play and I get lost in what I was trying to accomplish. 

In a dwr you have little areas where you can repeat the same design, or go crazy with different designs in different rings. 

For this most recent dwr, I was running out of time, the motivation behind this quilt was for a close friend who is getting married (this weekend!) and I needed the quilt done on time. Opting for a simpler wedding ring quilting design was just what I needed to make it across the finish line.

I had this minimalist idea of outlining and echoing my rings so they stood out from the background and just doing straight lines in between that look like they run behind the rings. 

The design was simple, so I could just buckle down and get it done without having to stress about getting the perfect design, or being too “custom”.

The last time I made a dwr I definitely went a bit fancier in the quilting, it was also for a wedding, but I had a bit more time and less going on in life, so I could afford a bit more time on the FMQ. 

If you want to see the design I used on that DWR quilt, you can see it here! 

And if neither of these designs gets the creative juices going for your own dwr, be sure to check out my 10 Easy Quilting Designs for Beginners, it’ll be sure to give you some great ideas 🙂

How to finish a double wedding ring quilt

When it comes to finishing a double wedding ring quilt, you have a couple of different options: 

• Scalloped edge
• Straight edge

Both options are absolutely beautiful and just provide slightly different looks to your quilt. 

A scalloped edge that runs along the outside edge of the rings is something you don’t typically see on any other style quilt, so being able to do one on a double wedding ring really gives it that “WOW” factor. 

Its a bit more difficult and uses a bias binding because of the curvature, but its well worth the effort and definitely gives the quilt a timeless classic finish.

Interested in seeing details on this option? Check out this tutorial by Andy at A Bright Corner on a scalloped quilt edge to see how it looks finished and how to do it on your next project.

The other option is to go with a straight edge to the quilt. This is my personal preferred option and the one that I used in today’s finished quilt. 

The simple border around the outside of the rings not only allows you to finish the quilt off square like any other quilt, but I believe that it brings a modern look to an older quilt design. 

Not to mention, it allows you to make the quilt a bit larger in size without having to make more rings. 😉

The sooner we can finish those rings, the better! 

Keeping up on the best quilting tips

Sometimes the difference between a quilt design living on your bucket list or living (finished) on your quilt rack is having the confidence in knowing that you have a plan of attack on the pattern.

Feeling like you are winging a “difficult” pattern thats going to “take too long” and “take too much time” all goes away when you have the right tips and tricks up your sleeve before you ever cut into fabric. 

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