Life with Nin

Adventures in Circles

Posted on 09 September 2010

Ever wonder how to make lovely circles on your quilts?  I know I resorted to tracing a glass and needle turn applique when I made a quilt for my great niece a last year.

close up of the circle part of this quilt

At the end of July I learned some other methods, thanks to a workshop my quilt guild sponsored with  Leigh MacDonald.

The project we were doing is the Circle Four Patch, shown here on Leigh’s site.    The pattern is also found in Leigh’s book, Adventures in Circles.  Leigh was a delightful and knowledgeable teacher who challenged us to get out of our comfort zone and try something new.

The supply list for the workshop called for either bright batiks or ethnic prints for the circles and dark print scraps for the backgrounds.  I wanted to work out of my stash and didn’t have that many compatible batiks or ethnic prints.  I kept looking at the fabric I did have and finally realized the oriental fat quarter bundle I’d won at guild several years ago would work nicely with some additional fabric I had.  But what to use for the background?  Nothing I had seemed quite right and I wasn’t certain I wanted a variety of different fabrics for the background.

Out came my fabric paints.  Rather than different fabrics, I decided to use the same fabric with different resists so that there would be variety in that way.  I actually used some of the paint I’d mixed up for the dogwood that  didn’t quite work for that, a yellow/gold color.  For masks, I used two sets of scrap booking paper which had the same cutouts but in different sizes.  For the third section, I crumbled the fabric after I painted it for one of my favorite effects.  I also gradually lightened the color by adding water to the mixture.

fabric drying in the sun

finished fabric

After cutting the oriental prints and background fabric into the required sizes, I was ready for the workshop.

Both of the techniques Leigh taught – freezer paper applique and fusible applique – rely on accurately cutting circles.  She showed us several tools for doing that.  Using a compass to draw the line and very small rotary cutter was one method.  Using the Olfa circle cutter was another.

There is a bit of a knack to using the Olfa circle cutter and, although other members of the class mastered it, I did not.  But I was happy with the increased accuracy of the small rotary cutter over a pair of scissors for cutting out the freezer paper circles.

First I cut the freezer paper templates,  lightly pressed it onto the fabric, then trimmed the fabric slightly larger than the template.   Carefully using the tip of the iron to ease the fabric around the paper, I prepared the circle to be attached to the background square by pinning it in place, matching the center of the circle to the center of the block.  Setting my sewing machine to a satin stitch (you could also use a zigzag stitch) with invisible thread in the top, I slowly stitched the circumference of the circle to background.

One block finished.  Here are several more laid out on the background for me to finish later.

The second technique, fusible applique, is one that I was already familiar with.  When I finish this quilt, I will probably use the fusible applique technique.  It is faster and since some form of top stitching is necessary with either technique, I will probably chose to fuse.  The invisible thread, not my favorite thread to work with, does not draw the eye to the stitching the way other colors would and allows the circles to take center stage.

If I follow the pattern exactly, I’ll end up with about a 36″ square quilt.  I don’t find that a useful size, so I’m sure I’ll figure out some way to enlarge the quilt, probably to a lap size quilt.  Or maybe I’ll go the other way and make it into a lap robe for our nursing home charity project.  Time will tell.