Monday, January 20, 2014

Circles never end

For Stitched my theme this year is circles and yes I know the total number of quilts for this year is 4, I have completed my second one already :-). When I was working on my Onion quilt, I had another idea as well. Of course I could have waited till April to start with it, but I have time available at the moment, so why not start straight away. This quilt started out as one piece of snow dyed fabric. Added batting and a backing fabric and stitched the outlines. Turned everything around and cut an opening in the backing fabric close to the top. I cut a number of circles out of freezer paper and started playing around to found a interesting design. After that I stitched around the circles and removed the paper. The quilting I did on the rest of the quilt was just straight lines.
The next part was the scary part. I cut out the central part of the circles. If I had made a mistake I could have thrown the quilt away, but luckily everything went okay. Of course the color of the batting was white and this would show a bit, I used a pink marker to give the batting some color. With floss I hand stitched around the circles. The straight lines needed more quilting so I added lots of circles on it as you can see on the detail picture.
Years ago I found a capiz shell lamp in a garage sale. I did not have any use for the lamp, but I wanted the shells :-). These shells I added to the open spaces and this is how the quilt looks now:

 And a detail:
The quilting I did on this piece gave me lots and lots of thread ends. I could have connected the circles, but this would have give another look and that was not what I wanted. Size is 12"x24" (30x60 cm) and the title is Circles never end.

2 comments:

The Idaho Beauty said...

Brilliant! The circle quilting over the straight line quilting is very effective (more so than either one on its own) and ties the whole thing together.

I've only tried this cut-out method to suspend an item within once, and it was indeed nerve-racking when I got to the cutting stage (and I only did one cutout!) But I just loved what it did for the quilt.

Diane in NH said...

I love this and would like to give it a try. I don't understand what you mean when you said, " Turned everything around and cut an opening in the backing fabric close to the top."

I'd appreciate some clarification.
Thanks for sharing,
Diane