Quiltingboard Forums - My first mystery quilt saved by Prep Tool

I just read here this morning about someone having trouble with crooked piecing, and thought I would show the quilt top I just finished with the help of a few tools that I used for this quilt. It is the “Just Takes 2” online mystery quilt that I just completed. I was not an experienced quilter when I decided to take part in this quilt, and my first 4 blocks or so came out awful and did not come out the right size and I thought I would not get through this project and just quit. I was piecing by hand and trying to mark my seam allowance with a ruler and just not getting the ¼ inch seam right on any of the pieces, causing the blocks to be all different sizes than they were supposed to be. Then I went to a local quilt show and picked up something called the Prep Tool made by Guidelines4quilting and started marking my seam allowances with that tool, and from then on everything fit together and I was amazed how the final assembly went together perfectly. The tool is made so the edge catches the fabric and when you press down, there is another edge that holds the fabric in place and your pencil marks at exactly the ¼ inch. It is a small tool and just slides along if you need to mark a bigger piece or the edge of a block. It’s so much faster and easier to mark a seam allowance without having to check the measurements on a ruler. It’s good for hand or machine piecing too. I also used Marti Michell templates whenever I could match them to blocks so I didn’t have to make templates, and they really make it easy to cut perfect pieces for your blocks. The quilt is so big I didn’t know how to take a picture, so put it on the floor and ran upstairs and hung over the bannister with my camera only to look down and see my dog sitting on the quilt looking up at me. Now I have to choose a border and I am going to attempt to hand quilt it.