100 Circles for 100 Days

Yesterday, I showed you some circles up to 87. Today is Day 100, and it was my hope to catch up and have 100 circles made to commemorate the milestone of 100 days. Let's see if I was successful.

The photos turned out to load out of order so some of my explanation will make more sense as you see the other circles in this batch.

Circle 88 

This circle came much later in the batch, when I realized that most of the colors I had used were not primary colors, and since I started with them, I wanted to make sure I maintained continuity with using red.  I had also realized earlier that I had not been including other shapes besides circles very much so I used triangles and squares here as well.

Circle 89 

This simple block breaks a lot of rules. I used a selvage here. I usually don't use selvages so this breaks that rule.  I also had the circle be the same fabric as the background, and I don't think I've done that in this quilt.  I also didn't sew down the square and left the ends loose.  When I sew this square to the others, the ends will extend into other blocks. Since all the other blocks are self contained, this breaks that rule.

Circle 90 

I pieced the X on this one so all the circles in this batch wouldn't be applique circles. The background fabric is also right side down because I wanted a lighter yellow.

Circle 91 

This one uses leftovers of Circle 95 which was made first. The circles made a square!

Circle 92 

This is a leftover of circle 96. It uses an embroidery stitch. The others are too neat and I wanted a messy one in the bunch.

Circle 93

I've been wanting to make a bulls eye block, and I know this one isn't one exactly, but I didn't feel like making four blocks and only being able to use one quarter of all of them, at least not  now when I am working under a deadline. This is the first one in the batch where I only sewed down the center and left the edges free.

Circle 94 

I saw a circle in a corner on another blog, and realized that all of my circles are relatively centered, so I had to break a rule I didn't know I had!

Circle 95 

The circles are cut out of a square. One of the 1857 blocks uses this idea.

Circle 96 

I wanted to use a whole circle, and got this fabric from my stash. I want to use mostly scraps for this quilt, but this is a rule breaking quilt after all. The fabric does all the work here.  I just cut out a circle and slapped it on the background.

Circle 97 

This is another attempt to use primary colors. I haven't used blue and green for a while.

Circle 98 

This uses scraps from Circle 99.  I wanted another messy one and really like the asterisk circle.

Circle 99 

 I've been using brown a lot as my dark background and wanted to use something different.  The plain circle looked boring so I decided to add the purple scrap.

Circle 100 

Woo hoo! I did it! I made 100 circles in 100 days.  This one uses other shapes in addition to the circle, and uses green.

Scenic Route

As a present for you for sticking with me for 100 days, I also want to show you the finished rail fence quilt.  When I pieced it, I was thinking of roads, since I pieced the dark strips together. When I was making it, I thought about adding pieces on the side so the road would be continuous but decided against it.

I quilted a small circle around that drop that showed up on its own, and using other circular things from around the house to add more circles randomly in the quilt. I used a washable marker to mark the lines and then when I was done, became worried that it might not wash out.

You can see that the marker was able to wash out.  I rinsed it in cold water, following Allie's suggestion to avoid detergent.  There was one fabric that didn't want to let go of the dye, but it washed out also.I did get a chuckle out of the thought that I could have circles in my circle quilt that weren't actually in the quilt.

This little doggie wanted to model the quilt.

The back uses a cute dog fabric playing in the yard.  I appliqued a square on the left as a label.

In retrospect, I do think that this quilt could represent road trips and getting lost and going around in circles.  The key is to just relax and take the time to enjoy the scenery.  I am going to call it Scenic Route.

It was a beautiful sunny day outside again, and even though the doggie wants a nap, I thoroughly enjoyed making circles today and showing you Scenic Route.

Linked to:
TGIFF
Let's Bee Social #113
Scrap Quilt Challenge

Circles 79 - 87

Here's another batch of circles for the Quilty 365 Circle project. Mine is currently named The Rule Breaking Quilt.

 Circle 79

I already showed you Circle 78 which is on the left. It uses leftovers from the Adrinka quilt.
Circle 79 is on the right. An apple is not quite round, but I thought it was close enough. It was a scrap of fabric I picked up to trim and decided to turn into a circle instead.

 Circle 80

 I used a pieced background because I wanted something different that didn't look I made these batches at a time.  I was piecing it as a leader and ender while quilting the leftover rails quilt, which meant that this one finished before the other ones that were being prepped. I think I am going to choose the arrangement in the quilt for this batch, but I have to number them to show you.

Circle 81

PBS (Create TV) had a six hour marathon where they showed quilting shows. My allergies were really bad, so I couldn't do much work but it did give me a good excuse to watch all of them.

I'm pretty sure that all the shows were reruns but since I don't get up at 6am to watch tv, I had only seen a couple of them which had aired at more reasonable times.  It was nice to put faces and personalities to some of the names I had seen on the internet.

One of the techniques they presented on Quilting Arts was layering the fabrics, sewing circles, and cutting the layers.  Then using machine embroidery to embellish.

 Here is me butchering this technique. I put the layers in an incorrect order(I think the background goes in the back  not the front)  and cut the black line way too skinny so it is hard to see, but I like the way it looks here.

 Circle 82

The reason my dining table is not rid of scraps that need to be trimmed for scrap vortex is that I keep bringing more downstairs.  This is one I brought downstairs. I want to keep making plain circles because that is absolutely allowed and I don't want people to forget that. I like that this one is dark and sedate. I used embroidery stitches around it which you can't see very well in the picture, but it will be a nice reward for people who bother to take the time to look at the individual circles.

 Circle 83

 Another do, using a small scrap from the railfence quilt.  This one makes me hungry for All Sorts candy.

 Circle 84

One of the scraps I brought downstairs was a bag of leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell quilt. (That quilt is sandwiched and holding my safety pins for ransom.)  The scraps are very tiny, and only some of them have fusible on the back of them.  I had the fusible out anyway as I am tracing the blocks for the 1857 quilt, so it was an easy decision to make these.

 Circle 85

This one uses leftovers of a circle block which uses leftovers from the rail fence leftovers which uses leftovers of the rail fence quilt. These pieces already had fusible on them so it was a simple matter of arranging them and sewing them down.

 Circle 86

These are more leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell.  I wanted to make a circle out of shapes that were not circular.

Circle 87

The glasses were supposed to be the circular part, but they didn't turn out as circular as I wanted, and the background fabric wasn't flat enough to use so I cut it out and appliqued it on a new background. This one one represents my new pair of glasses, although they don't look like that.

I have also quilted circles on my leftover rail fence quilt.  I used a green washable marker to draw the circles and am hoping that it washes out.  Poor Zeus was so confused when I brought out different sizes of  plates but no food!  Yesterday with my allergies, I chose a sedate green for the binding, but today I cut out a bright orange. I want to hurry and bind it so I can get it washed before the marker becomes permanent.

Linked to:
Move it Forward Monday 
Linky Tuesday

Too Long To-Do List

It's been a few days since I posted, and although I have been doing quilty things, they didn't seem very post worthy.  I had a large list of things to do, not an official list, but things that I had been planning on doing.

• Quilt leftovers quilt
• quilt rail fence quilt
• clean up sewing area
• prepare scraps for vortex quilt
• catch up on circles
• start 1857 quilt

I have been making progress on much of it, but each one took other steps that slowed it down.


For example, I found a fat quarter that was perfect for the leftovers quilt.   But the leftover quilt is almost exactly the size of a fat quarter, which meant I had to do a little piecing of the backing to quilt it.  Not a big deal, but I hadn't expected that.  It is  now sandwiched and ready for quilting.

It's also snowed several days, so some time has been taken out for snow shoveling, which I also enjoy doing.

Most people did not find a mistake with the balance with the rail fence quilt, but I had already taken a set of blocks out to fix it.  Here's the revised version. Hopefully I didn't do anything to make it worse.  This means I have met my goal for the month for OMG, although I do hope to quilt it this month too.

 I've been working on cleaning the sewing area / dining table, which mostly means trimming up scraps into rectangles. There are a lot of pieces that aren't rectangles because of all the improv and applique I have been doing lately, but I started a nice stack and the dining table looks much nicer. I just have to trim the rest of the scraps and put away the bigger pieces in the storage area.

I have bought,  washed, dried and ironed the fabric for the 1857 quilt.

I was trying to focus on cleaning the area before working on anything new, such as the 1857 quilt or the circles, as a way to motivate the cleaning, but it seems to backfire.  Do you know what happens when you don't make the circle for the day?  There are two, not one circle to make the next day.  They keep adding on, making it harder and harder to catch up.  Even though I enjoy making the circles, this fact makes me lose my motivation.  My 100th day is coming up on Tuesday, and my goal was to have a post entitled "100 Circles in 100 Days."  I need to make lots of catch up circles so that post can happen.

Linked to:
Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts

African Circles

Vera told me about Le Challenge which is about "round" this week.  I can't enter Rule Breaking Quilty 365 Circles quilt because the challenge requires a finished project.  Even though it isn't Throwback Thursday, this requires that I go back in time to show a quilt from long ago.  I've made a couple of circle quilts.

It is funny how many themes are recurring from 2010 now in 2016. I was making this quilt at about the same time I was working on the Cheddar Crackers which I finished this year. I made a quilt using circles and African fabrics.

I made this circle quilt out of African fabrics in 2010.  This is one of the first quilts I made without a pattern.  I cut out the circles using a CD as a template, and arranged them on a background.  I found that the busier background helped keep the various African fabrics from competing with each other.

I used straight pins to hold the circles down as I appliqued them onto the background, so they kept pinching me or falling off.  I didn't use any fusible. Once they were in place, I quilted around the circles and a few big random zig zag designs on the quilt. The goal was to follow what I had read about African superstition - that to keep the devil out, you must keep it confused.

This quilt is hanging in my family room right now, so it was easy to think of it when I thought about my circle quilts. It is a good size for a lap quilt.

This one is from 2009. This one is a small quilt.

The background is pieced in alternating colors.  



The circles are needle turned by hand, and I did a chain stitch using crochet thread around each of the circles.  It has the lovely checkerboard border that I always like.

Yellow Challenge

Factotum of Arts is sponsoring a challenge to create a palette of yellow fabrics. Here's my submission.

When looking for a color to go with the yellow, I found that I liked these greens the best - a classic color combination is classic because it has been tried and tested. I like the long vertical stripes in many of these fabrics, and added a few other prints for balance.

Happy Valentine's Day

Hello my dear readers and welcome back.  I hope you have a splendid Valentine's Day.

There isn't much to show you, but there has been a great deal of progress.

When last I left you, I had pieced another set of circles.  This week, I pieced that set of circles into the row, added the big circle.  I am now left with two parts, which makes me happy.  I haven't made many more circles so I will show you those later.

The 1857 quilt has been tempting me and I have decided to make it.  Since I promised June,  I decided I needed to get the rail fence quilt into a top first.  Here it is.  I need to do a quality inspection step and press it.  I really like this layout because every time you look at it, you see a different configuration.

I could have balanced the darks better.  I had laid it out in a balanced way, but when I sewed it together, I made some impromptu changes.  I wasn't thinking of the pink and black block as a dark, but it certainly looks like it from this picture. I am going to think of some simple changes I can make to balance this more. I think the top row just looks darker because of the lighting, but I don't like that diagonal row of darks.

I also made another block for the Adrinka 2016 BOM and a corresponding Circle 78.

Linked to:
Moving It Forward Monday

Circles 73-77

I have made enough circles that I can combine another set of rows.

Circle 73: This one is a pleated circle, which is hard to see in this image. The vertical lines are pleats. The horizontal lines are sewn to hold down the pleats. I have ordered new glasses, and when I get them, I will trim away all the loose threads in this quilt.

Circle 74: This one has been moved up from a little farther back because I liked this order better. This is not the first time I have broken the chronological order rule.

It is a broken circle - more leftover fabric from the rail fence quilt.  When I sewed it down though, I went all the way around.  The bobbin has red thread.

Circle 75: This is my attempt to copy Kaja's pretty striped circles. I don't have her pretty fabrics, but I do have stripes.  I sort my fabric by color, and decided that instead of discombobulating the sewing room worse than it is, I would use the first striped fabric I found.  This one came from a charm pack.

 I don't know how Kaja makes her circles, but I turned under the edges and tried to be neater to copy her style. I don't think you will be able to tell there are elephants there after the blocks are joined, but they makes me think of her too, since she made an elephant quilt.

Circle 76: I made  this one with a pieced background and a pieced circle to copy Dawn Chorus Studio.  Again, I copied her some of her methods but didn't capture her style. I didn't turn under these edges because I had smaller scraps.

 Circle 77: Most of the circles in this quilt are about the same size. I wanted to make one that was much smaller. So here's my circle dot.  I like that in this quilt, you can't tell that this one and the one before it both have fabrics that come from the same quilt.

Eventually I will also make a circle that is too big for the background. I think the one below this one can be big since it won't hide this circle.

And here is where they will fit in the quilt.  I have pieced together all these circles and can now add this row to the one above it, and both rows to the big circle.  I am glad to be able to get to a point where I can join these because I don't like this quilt to be in so many sections.

Linked to:
Let's Bee Social #111 
Oh Scrap! 2/14/16