Making my DQS10 quilt for Diana really lit a fire under me to try and do more circle design work so I thought I would try another small project to test the ol’ skill set. I also wanted to contribute to the Pillow Party over at Stitched in Color- I have been loving the goodness coming out of her contests and it has really inspired me. I started out by sketching and doodling some circling on an artist’s pad:
I like where I was going with the sketch and I was digging the whole ‘looks kinda like a dahlia’ thing so I decided to ramp it up and make a full scale draft of the picture:
Left: Revised sketch, Right: initial Sketch
When I looked at it from afar I really didn’t like the proportions that I was seeing, it seemed a bit stretched out to me so I tried it again with some slightly different circle ratios and got the sketch you see above on the left. I like this one better. Now onto the color options! I am not much of a pink and purple gal and blues, browns, and greens aren’t really flower colors so I narrowed it down straightaway to reds, oranges, and yellows. And of course some green to represent the leaves.
This was the initial color combo I came up and when I quit working on it that night I was convinced I was a genius color matcher:
Too harsh and dark
Lesson: always sleep on your fabric decisions…sheesh I would have made a stoplight quilt!!
Here is my revised color combo:
Lighter, brighter, and less harsh
Much better I think. A little softer and not so harsh but still vibrant.
Here is how I did it:
1. The whole thing is really only five shapes organized around a central hub; therefore I took some freezer paper and made templates of the five shapes plus the central piece:
2. I then laid a piece of lightweight fusible interfacing (fusible side up) over the full sized sketch and taped it to secure:
Lightweight fusible laid over my sketch
3. After I cut out my pieces of fabric from my template, I laid them over the interfacing, just like a puzzle.
4. I very carefully removed the tape and moved the interfacing over to my ironing board and fused all the pieces onto the interfacing. I then cut off the extra interfacing and voila! You have a flower looking thingy! I centered this on a 21″ square piece of solid (Kona Bone) backing. stitching around the perimeter secures the flower to the backing:
Pin it lots so it doesnt shift while sewing it down
Now I have to make the bias tape to go around each border. I used this guy to make my bias tape–these things are handy! Make sure you are cutting your fabric on the bias—don’t shortcut here cause it’s next to impossible to manage the curves without the fabric being on the bias.
Once you have all the bias tape ready you can start covering up all your raw edges. Here is the key: start and stop your circle at a place where the next bias circle will cover it. This way, when you are done, you will only have one raw edge in on the whole thing. In theory.
After you have attached all of your bias tape borders, you can make your quilt sandwich and start quilting! For this technique, I recommend quilting around the borders of the bias tape so that they really stay put AND pop out when the rest of the quilt is quilted:
Quilted in the ditch along bias tape
Backside showing quilting in the ditch
Here are some more pics of the pillow in action, I hope this guide to improvisation has inspired you to try this technique for yourself. If there is enough interest, mayhap I will put together a proper tutorial. Please please post questions in the comments or email me if you would like further clarification.
pretty pillow, ugly ground
I like having a zipper pull for my zips!
I got the idea for a covered zipper from here.
bright Sun, growing flower
The middle is my favorite bit
