Blogger's Quilt Festival Fall 2017

 I've enjoyed entering and visiting the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side over several years.  I've delayed sharing my most recent quilt finish for a few months, so the festival was a good excuse to get back to the blog and continue documenting my adventures in sewing.

One of my first quilts I made with modern fabrics was "Circle Circus." I fell in love with one of the first modern boy fabric collections ever to arrive on the fabric scene: Urban Circus by Laurie Wisbrun.  I honestly ended up buying and using 7.5 yards of that blue elephant print.  (I was a new mom to a sweet baby boy and loved sewing for him.... who's now about to turn 8 years old!).

Here's a picture of that quilt from 2013:

Adhering to the mentality, "I love this fabric and if I don't buy it now, it will be unavailable when I am ready to use it;" I stocked up on the girl colors of the fabrics too, not necessarily convinced I'd someday have a daughter- I just loved the collection!  So several years later, I made the girl version of this quilt.

Being corny and always one to enjoy an "on location" photo opportunity, we took the quilt to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo a few months ago.  One of the giraffes seemed curious about what we were doing:

This quilt is made from such a simple pattern: circles on squares.  I appliqued the circles using the Super Circles technique, aka the "tin foil method."  I used tons of stash fabrics for this quilt, cutting a circle and square out of 47 different fabrics.  I really like the scrappy look.

I bravely decided to quilt this as my first quilt on my newly acquired longarm over the summer.  Quilting it went pretty well overall, I had a decent degree of confidence in being able to quilt this quilt because I'd (essentially) already quilted it before.  I simply started at the beginning of a row and swirled in and out of the circles along the row.

You can see the quilting here pretty well:

For the backing, I used a big chunk of an older RK London Calling fabric as well as a bunch of orphan blocks from a baby quilt I'd made in 2011.  That felt great to finally use those up!

I used an Ann Kelle dotted stripe for the binding:

The quilt measures about 64x80.  It's now one of many quilts in possession by my daughter but she's still graciously allowed me to use it now and then.

Thanks for reading!