Animal Party Circle Quilt



Yay for baby quilts! Seriously everyone I know is either pregnant or just had a baby...which means...I'm going to be making lots of baby quilts! This one is for my future nephew Oliver, who is due in a couple weeks (he is actually due on my birthday). I designed this one myself...The fabric is mostly Animal Party by Amy Schimler for Robert Kaufman...I thought it was so cute, I just started grabbing all of it--without really having a plan for it--but then I saw the little animals on the panel and I knew it would be perfect for a circle quilt!



I have been wanting to make a circle quilt for a long time...I actually have had one planned...but I couldn't decide which method to use to make the circles--there are quite a few ways I have found to do it...fusible web...freezer paper...water soluble thread...something to do with foil I read about somewhere...but none of them seemed to be right for what I wanted to do (several circles that overlap each other) without a: taking forever and b: being really bulky and/or stiff. Well then I remembered an applique method I had used in my very first quilting class back in college --where we had sewn fusible interfacing to the shape, turned it inside out, pressed it to the fabric, stitched around it and then cut the back off to reduce the bulk (here is a random tutorial I found that illustrates pretty well how to to this). So I decided to test it out on this quilt. Well I'm here to tell ya...it works LIKE A CHARM for circles. They're fast, easy and you can do parts of it while waiting in the doctors office or watching Kipper with your 2 year old ;) Oh yeah, and the circles turn out beautifully!



I debated for a day or two about how to quilt this...and then finally decided to just echo the circles. I used a circle groovy board to make them look as round as possible :) And I used half circle rulers to go around the applique shapes-which worked quite well.




And then I found this fun park to take pictures in...




Stripey binding = my favorite part!