Patchwork Circle Quilt

This patchwork circle quilt is one of our favorite quilt patterns. It is a wickedly easy quilt pattern, but does require your time and dedication. Don't worry, the end result is worth it!

Materials:

• Queen size sheet for front
• Queen size sheet for back
• Several coordinating (or not) fabrics for the circles - I used six and needed just over 1/2 yard each
• Lightweight fusible interfacing (~6 yds.)
• Batting
• Pins
• LOTS and lots and lots of coordinating thread
• Safety pins
• Disappearing pen or fabric chalk
• CD

Instructions:

1. Cut your sheet to fit your bed's dimensions: 70" x 86" works great on a twin bed. Put aside.
    
2. Get out your lovely fabrics.
    
3. Next, iron your interfacing onto each of your coordinating fabrics (the back, obviously). Start with 1/2 yard of each fabric...you can always make more later if you need to (I used 35 of each fabric). How many you are going to need is going to depend on the spacing you choose (there are 208 on this one).
    
4. Now we are ready to start tracing out our circles. If you don't have a circle cutter, a CD works great as a template. Be precise when you cut your circles because there is no way to hide uneven edges! Your circles will look like this:
    
5. Get out the sheet that you cut previously. We are going to use it in one piece,we are not making blocks. Now start laying out your circles.You can eyeball or measure the distance between circles. This quilt has 16 circles on the length and 13 circles on the width. They are about 1/2" apart. I would leave 1" around all of the edges so that you have enough room for your binding.
    
6. We are going to attach the circles with safety pins for now. I recommend only attaching about 20 at a time. I found that this was pretty easy to work with. It gets tricky if you have too many.
    
7. Now start sewing on your circles. I used a zig-zag stitch in purple thread.
    
8. For the back, I used a purple sheet. I did not pre-cut the sheet. Instead I laid it out flat and then put the batting on top and then finally the quilted top on that. Once I was sure everything was all smoothed out and even. I pinned all around the edges. Once I did this, I loosely cut both the batting and the backing, not worrying too much if there was still a bit of excess.
    
9. Now comes the quilting. And yes, I was able to do this on my home machine. I'm not sure that I would want to do much bigger of a quilt on this machine, but it worked out fine for a twin. Use the Quilting Foot that comes with your machine (not the Walking Foot). Be sure to lower your feed dogs so that you can move the quilt about freely on the machine. Start in the middle of the quilt and work your way out. Depending on what colors you choose, you may want to quilt the background one color and the circles another. I just did a free form loop-de-loop pattern. It is really quite small on the background since I had to go through a lot of tight spaces. But, I did it much bigger inside the circles.
    
10. Once you are done quilting, trim up the edges so that all three layers are perfectly even.
     
11. Now you are ready to start binding. I used 9 yards of extra wide double fold bias tape.
     
12. If you look at bias tape, you'll notice that one side is longer than the other. You want the long side to be on the back of your quilt. Unfold the bias tape and sew down the inside flap of the long side to the back of your quilt. I found it easiest to do one side at a time. Now fold you bias tape back up and over to the front side. Sew all the way down the side you just worked on making sure to "catch" the bias tape on the back.
     
13. Since we are doing one side at a time, you will want to finish the corners as you go. You can either miter the corners or you can do them square. I played around with it and decided that I liked them squared the best. Just fold over your ends and then overlap them in a square. Sew down.
    
14. And that's it!