September Bee Inspired Block

Turkey Tracks: October 2, 2020

September Bee Inspired Block

The Mount Battie Modern Quilt Guild met on Zoom recently and shared our blocks for September’s prompt challenge: our receiving member, Nancy Wright, wanted creative circles in brights placed on a neutral backgrounds.

You can see all the blocks we did on the Facebook page Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild.

I used the appliqué method I learned from our Sugaridoo QAL challenge in our other local quilting group, the Coastal Quilter’s (Maine). Sugaridoo used small half circles and then, in another row, 4-inch full circles. I hoped that a BIG circle would also work. It does.

I used one of my diner plates to trace the circle on the fusing side of 101 SF interfacing. I layed the interfacing circle on the FRONT of the newsprint fabric and sewed around the drawn circle. Next, clip away the inner circle and clip into the curves. Turn the interfacing to the back—and if you’ve got the fusible side next to the fabric, you can use the tip of the iron to lightly fuse the circle edge so it is stable and all the interfacing is no longer showing. (Don’t fuse any more than just around the circle edge.) Then you just lay the open newsprint/backingcircle over your prepared circle fabric and pin it down. Pull at the edges of the outer fabric to smooth everything down well. Next, sew around the edge of the (newsprint fabric here) circle—use a bigger stitch. Then trim out all the excess fabric on the back, leaving your backing intact of course. Finally, give the finished piece a nice ironing.

I’ve been looking for a painless way to create BIG circles where the method does not need a ruler. This method works for me.

I deliberately placed my circle off-center and left a lot of surrounding backing so Nancy will have lots of room to manipulate/trim my block when quilt top assembly begins.