This is the last one I finished.

It's for Jacquie who is making a quilt for her teenage son. The instructions were "minimal, modern and masculine." The inspiration for this design came partly from reading about Dale Fleming's technique for sewing pieced curves which I found here at Dioramarama.com. If you want to learn this technique you can visit either of these sites for thorough instructions but I thought I'd walk you through the basics of this block. It was a little different because of the multiple overlapping circles. If this all seems confusing you should visit one of the above links. Then it'll all make sense, I swear!
I started with the circle in the corner since it was on the "bottom" of all of the overlapping circles. I cut out the size of circle I wanted from freezer paper and ironed the shiny side to the wrong side of my background fabric like so, positioning the hole where I want the pieced circle to be.
Next, I cut away the BG fabric inside of the circle, leaving a roughly 1/2 in seam allowance.
When that glue was dry (which only takes a few seconds) I applied more glue to the back of the clipped fabric which I pressed the colored dot fabric to, thus allowing me to remove the freezer paper all together.
To make an overlapping circle I just placed my next freezer paper stencil over the seam, doing everything the same, treating the pieced er, piece as a solid background.
This only got tricky when it came to gluing the seams down. Because there were multiple layers of fabric I had to do some creative trimming. Also, this background fabric was some thick-ass linen! Things got a little bulky which is why some of my circles aren't exactly perfect. I would not do this again with fabric like this. Cotton on cotton though would be much less of a hassle.
And that's it! Again, this is no where near a comprehensive tutorial so if you really want to try this technique visit the links above.
dude. this is awesome! I pick up one of those circle cutters at a thrift store, but could never get it to work for me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this! It looks like a lot of work, but I'd like to try it sometime soon
ReplyDeletethanks for posting this! It reminded me that I have seen this circle sewing somewhere before ... I´ll give it a try now!
ReplyDelete