Sunday, March 03, 2013

Finished Circle Quilt

Yesterday I finished up the binding on my circle quilt. I am trying to make a dent in my UFOs and am glad to have this one done.
finished circle quilt
(my helper's arms were not quite long enough to hold the quilt out straight; it's a big quilt)

The quilt is 60" x 80", and I quilted it in a spiral, mostly using my walking foot. I had some issues with the layers shifting, even with the walking foot and having the presser foot pressure loosened. Part way through, I undid the remaining basting pins, smoothed the layers out again, and rebasted it, with the pins closer together than the first time. Then I loosened my presser foot pressure a little bit more and started quilting again. It went better after those changes, but there was still a little bit of minor shifting.

The center of the quilted spiral was quilted last, with my free motion quilting foot. I was really nervous about how that would go, but I was able to quilt it more smoothly than I expected.
circle quilt back
The back of the quilt is pretty simple with red and yellow fabrics I got from Connecting Threads, and blue kelp I got on sale a while back.

Most of the binding came from my binding scraps (I had a lot of brown) and I added some red, yellow, and blue fabrics. It was nice to have most of the strips cut and pressed already. 

This is my second circle quilt; my first one was a baby quilt made for my niece in 2010. When I made that quilt I wrote a couple of tutorial blog posts about designing your own circle quilt and drafting the patterns/templates for this block. Back then, I also promised a "how to figure yardage" post... and then I never wrote it. So I'm thinking I will go ahead and write that soon--let me know if you think it's something that would be helpful!

5 comments:

Robin Quilts, etc. said...

Love the quilting. It really looks great.

Alisa said...

Love it! I have plans in the works to make a quilt just like this. Nice job on the quilting too!

Patrizia said...

just beautiful!

Nancy said...

These Drunkard Path circle quilts are in my top-ten favorites. Nice choice for the quilting. Lovely, scrappy quilt. I'm curious.. did you mark the spiral, or just use a guide of some sort? Nicely done.

Cheri the Quilting Nanny said...

Just thought I"d let you know that you have inspired me to use multi color fabrics for the back of the quilt. I would have never thought it would look so nice to do that, but yours always do so I'm giving it a try on my next quilt. Thanks for sharing!