Shine: The Circles Quilt
66″ square
First block started June 2014 • Top finished June 2015
I’ve finished my quilt top and am happy to release it into the world today. I started sewing these English Paper Piecing patterns after I’d finished Kaleidoscope and needed a new hand project. I was also sick of straight lines, and though I’d do some circles. Those of you who have followed along know that I took a lot of inspiration for the circles from a church my husband and I had visited while traveling in Slovenia, the art finding its way into fabric.
I named it Shine because of all those circles, those suns, those compass points, radiating out from the quilt. I could see this all done up in solids, too. I’ve seen a few of your starting your project. Please tag me on IG (occasionalpiecequilt) or drop me an email with a photo so I can see what you’ve begun.
I’ve now completed the instructions for this quilt, and have it available for purchase in my PayHip shop, listed as Shine: Circles Quilt Finishing Instructions, so you can finish off your quilt.
The last four circles — numbers 13 to 16 — are also available as a PDF download pattern: Final Four Blocks from Shine, but because the tutorials are image-heavy, I’ve kept the instructions for the circles on the blog. I’ve loved creating these and sharing them for free, so I hope you’ve enjoyed grabbing them and making them.
Where did I get the inspiration for the finishing? One day when I was walking around San Diego, I looked up and saw the facade of the building and thought, aha! — those crosses with circles would be perfect in between my circles. I ended up leaving off the circles as my quilt had a lot going on , but your quilt may be different, so you decide (the option is in the pattern).
And the border? I started here, in this archway from the church in Slovenia, with those triangles. But again, I wanted my circles — and all that handwork — to stand out, so I simplified it with trapezoidal pieces in between the triangles.
Tiny Swirly Gig Circles Block #13 of the Circles EPP Sew-A-Long
Since I so rationally decided that I needed SIXTEEN blocks to make up my quilt, all I can chalk it up to is summer heat (coupled with our drought, we are going to have so.much.fun), regular old garden variety stress (having cloth in your fingers lowers blood pressure so I heard), or a blissful existence of sitting on sofas eating bonbons while watching videos and stitching. Choose one.
But here I am again on the Final Four of the Circles Blocks, created because I wanted something more than straight lines to English Paper Piece.
As usual, I assume you know how to do some EPP, but do like to give tips and more instructions here on the blog. For starters, I print out my papers on 24-lb. weight copy paper, a bit heavier than the usual stuff, and make sure my printer scaling is at 100%. Print off four copies of the pattern, and cut them out around all the lines. You only need one circle, though.
I also print off a color picture of the block (this one made in EQ7) and keep it in my little baggie full of pieces. It helps when my brain fades, or too much is going on around me, or I’m trying to remember what the heck all those little pieces are for.
Fabric selection is usually based on what falls out first of my stack, as I glance over at all my blocks up on my pin wall and try to find fabrics that I’ve used before, so the quilt will blend.
The other day I put a photo up on IG and someone asked me what my fabrics were. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, while I am totally impressed that a designer can make up a line of 14 fabrics that all go together, and I love love love them, doesn’t mean I’m going to use them all in a quilt at the same time (although I have done it once. Or twice.) And I’m a selvage cutter-offer, so the chances of me knowing what they are might probably be very slim. I’ll probably know the designer, but the name of the fabric? I have a thing for using a LOT of different fabrics in a quilt. I mean, it’s a great big fabric universe out there. Why not have fun?
The other tip to picking good fabrics is to know your color wheel–how it works, as well as your value scale (light-to-dark). (Illustration above from *here* which has a quick primer on color and value.) More quilts have been ruined by the inclusion of medium-value fabrics only, especially by the use of medium gray (ACK! ACK!). Try to get a range of hues (colors) in light (tints) to dark (shades).
Which direction do you want your swirls to go? If you want it to look like the pattern, place the printing face down on the wrong side of the pattern. Whichever way you do it, be consistent on both colors of swirls. I pin the pieces, slice around them with my rotary cutter (no, I am not exact), then use the glue method of getting the fabrics on the papers. (Your pattern pieces will look different than what is in the photo above, as I have revised and improved the pattern multiple times.)
Ta Da! All glued down. I don’t glue down that inner bit as it will be covered by the center circle.
I like to lay out all the pieces to see how they play together. I like this bunch. Often this is where I’ll switch out fabrics, trying to catch it before I get everything sewed together and then hate it. If the choices will fight with each other, let it be at this stage.
Sew a light swirl to a dark swirl, being consistent as to which color is on the left or the right.
Sew the sets of two into sets of four.
Add the points to the sets of four, attaching the rounded edge of the pointy piece to the swirls.
Stitch the background points in between those. I make sure that the “extra” background point always ends up on the same side, in this case, the right.
Don’t they look great?
Now join two sets of four to make a set of eight. Beauty shot. I stitch at night while watching movies with my husband and this dark leather foot rest makes a good backdrop.
Now join the last two seams. Yes, it’s okay to switch thread colors if you want to along one seam. In this case I used yellow on the swirls and white on the points.
Another beauty shot.
And another, from the back.
Cut a 14 1/2″ square of background fabric, fold in fourths and lightly iron in the creases so they will serve as registration marks for aligning your circle. Remove all but the outer-edge papers. If you see some wild seam allowances, trim them now (you’ll do it again at the end). While this is what you will cut for a background, in the Finishing Pattern, the block may be smaller when trimmed.
You know the point-up or point-down drill by now. (If you don’t know what I mean, I have lots of tips and tricks in the other twelve circle patterns. Click on the SHINE tab, above, to see the other circles.) Take time to try yours out on your background. Obviously I went with point up. Now I am not liking the center circle I had planned.
I have a bag of Rejected Center Circles, and I’m trying more out now.
But in the end, I went with this one, because often you just need a dark center to anchor the circle. Appliqué the large circle to the background, then cut out the back, as shown in earlier circle posts (again, you can access them all by the tab up above). Remove all the papers. Now is the time to trim any wild seam allowances.
Now appliqué on your middle circle, using tiny stitches. When finished, press face down on a well-padded ironing board (or a folded towel, if your board isn’t padded). Now you have another circle!
The circle patterns for numbers 13-16, plus new blocks 18-22 are available in my pattern shop.
To truly begin summer off correctly in Southern California, you need a fire, and we have a doozy of one going on right now, only a few miles from my house. The above map, from today, shows 21% containment, and I could see clouds of billowing smoke yesterday when I went to the grocery store. Usually we like to END our summers with a fire, but not this year, the fourth year of the drought.
So my friend and I decided to hit the road this morning, in order to recover from the ardor of Registering for QuiltCon 2016 (no, I didn’t get the Gwen Marston class), and visit the newest shop not too far from our town in the neighboring city of Temecula: Needle in a Fabric Stash.
Our only other dedicated-modern-shop is in Los Angeles, way too far away for a casual stop, so it was nice to find out about this place.
Sue Stone, the owner, has a well-curated selection of fabrics, from Alison Glass to Cotton and Steele to Dear Stella, and isn’t locked into one line too heavily, but instead displays them to encourage mixing between the designers.
Some fun displays and stacks of fabrics.
The displays and patterns are well organized and encourage browsing.
Here Sue is helping a young customer choose fabrics for a quilt.
A nice selection of solids, plus more lines.
Needle in a Fabric Stash is owned and managed by Sue (above).
She’s been in operation about 7 months, and has already set up some great classes.
We grabbed some lunch and kept going. . . over to Primitive Gatherings Quilt Shop, not located in Wisconsin (that would have been QUITE a road trip) but in the next town up, in Murrieta.
This friendly fellow, an import from Wisconsin, helped us get signed up in their store system, and showed us around. Since I used to live in Wisconsin, we traded that old joke about there being two seasons in Wisconsin: Construction and Winter. I knew the one about three seasons: June, July and Winter. He admitted that he would like to be back there during summer, but come winter. . . he was happy to be in California, where the car doors didn’t freeze shut.
As the name of the shop implies, the bulk of their fabrics are Civil War era prints, and they have lots of very cool displays.
The Modern Section.
I was amazed by the teensy tumblers quilt they had on display–along with teensy precuts to go with it.
We both liked their mini tote designs–they had several.
I don’t often jump on the Latest and Greatest Thing in QuiltLand, but this one called my name. It’s Jen Kingwell’s My Small World and was printed in the oh-so-elusive QuiltMania Spring issue 2015 (picture above is from the QuiltMania website). I don’t know why you are making it (there is a My Small World QAL on Instagram and other places), but I know why I am making it.
It’s because in the 1960s, when wearing white socks with your loafers was considered cool and women always wore pantyhose with their bare legs, I came here. Our family was on our way home from living for two years in Lima, Peru. It was in the days of Disneyland with tickets, and we seemed to have enough for our family of seven children to go on this ride. Since I had a broken leg, I went on it more than once.
The ride, first fabricated for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, was installed in California’s Disneyworld in 1966, which will make it fifty years old next year. I live about an hour from the original Disneyland, so it’s my patriotic duty to honor this institution, right? Of course we all know THAT song:
“Children of the World” was the working title of the attraction. Its tentative soundtrack, which can be heard on the album, featured the national anthems of each country represented throughout the ride all playing all at once, which resulted in disharmonic cacophony. Walt conducted a walk through of the attraction scale model with his staff songwriters Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman, saying, “I need one song that can be easily translated into many languages and be played as a round.” The Sherman Brothers then wrote “It’s a Small World (after all)” in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which influenced the song’s message of peace and brotherhood. When they first presented it to Walt, they played it as a slow ballad. Walt requested something more cheerful, so they sped up the tempo and sang in counterpoint. Walt was so delighted with the final result that he renamed the attraction “It’s a Small World” after the Sherman Brothers’ song.” (Wikipedia)
While I have no idea if Jen Kingwell was influenced by the smart geometrics, towers and shapes (Tokyo Disney, above), to me there is a clear connection.
Judging by the photos on Instagram, we all start here: cutting sky pieces. I did neutrals for a while, then started adding in whispy blues, just to make it more interesting, as I’d seen others do it. It’s that idea of collaboration, as expressed in my last blog post.
Section One’s Sky. I was listening to a book on Audible, that I finally had to turn up to 2x speed just to get through it. I’m not recommending it.
Now I’m back to Inspector Gamache, written by Louise Penny. I’m going to hate it when I get through reading this series!
Buildings and some sky. Now to start on the details. I found reading Susan’s entries on her PatchworknPlay blog was helpful, too.
I used some leftover leaves from the Pineapples and Crowns quilt to make this square.
Susan’s idea to start the tiny pinwheels by cutting two inch squares, then making HSTs, then on to the pinwheel was a good idea. I threw in some of my New York City fabric, with the words Radio City Hall to liven up this section.
It took me forever to figure out what text thing to put at the top of the building, but I went for this one, since Betsy is a childhood name. I also had fun fussy cutting a hot air balloon in the Sky Section for Section 2. You can see the bits of blue sky in the neutrals now. Here is the progress I’ve made so far:
And here’s my contribution to the Errata: In section 2, the center square for the churn dash is incorrect. It should measure 1 1/2″ no 2 1/2″. Having said that, I have enormous appreciation to Jen Kingwell for this pattern–it has a LOT of moving parts and to even get some sort of pattern down on paper is amazing.
In my real small world, I’ve taken a couple of trips since the semester finished.
The first one was to Phoenix to see my daughter’s husband graduate from Dental School. I think he had the oldest children of any of his fellow graduates there! They have happily moved to their new city, and he has started work already. But this week, they are on a trip to Disneyland to celebrate their achievement.
And to start the summer off with a bang, I also took a couple of trips through these two machines as a spot on my lungs showed up in my yearly X-ray. It is because of *this* that my oncologist checks everything. Twice. The diagnosis from these humming machines revealed it was nothing to worry about, although for three weeks I did — a lot. I couldn’t really talk about it at the time, so I’m glad it’s behind me.
However going through all that certainly made me feel like a basket case. No, I didn’t know about this when I started this quilt, but it certainly is appropriate! Now I should really get to the closets that need cleaning out, the papers that needs tossing. It’s nice to think about regular life again.
I’ve also been busy sewing up more Circles Blocks as I want to finish that quilt and get it quilted. I have one more to go, then I’ll have sixteen total. Block #13 will be up on the blog in a couple of weeks. Here they are stacked together:
And the border? I started here, in this archway from the church in Slovenia, with those triangles. But again, I wanted my circles — and all that handwork — to stand out, so I simplified it with trapezoidal pieces in between the triangles.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 