Back in the fall of 2023, I took a week-long class taught by Barbara Black. The class was built around Wendy Williams's pattern called Full Circle, a design which intentionally incorporates multiple techniques. While I rarely make quilts from patterns, I felt this class would introduce me to some new techniques and at the same time allow me to experience Barbara's excellent teaching.
For my fabric selections, I started with Giucy Giuce's original Deco Glo collection and added texty low-volume fabrics, some coordinating Essex linen yarn dyes, and a couple of busy neutrals for the background. A few of the blocks are scrappy as well.
In class, we focused on only one quadrant of the quilt. Even so, I didn't get very far. This was my status at the end of the week:
(Barbara wrote about our class
here.)
After the class was finished, I set aside the project for a while to work on a few other quilts. By this past fall I was ready to focus on completing this quilt.
I wasn't happy with my original fabric choices for the "spikes" (the larger triangles) -- there wasn't enough contrast between the yellow and the natural linen. A month or so after the class, the Deco Glo II collection became available, and I chose an orange from that collection to pair with the yellow instead.
My past experience with appliqué has been almost exclusively fused and raw edge. For this quilt I used several approaches to turned-edge appliqué, including Karen Buckley's Perfect Circles and needle-turned reverse appliqué. I used both machine stitching and hand stitching, depending on the block. The blue half-circles here are stitched by machine, while the black-and-white circles are appliquéd by hand.
The purple arches in three of the four quadrants are done with hand-stitched reverse appliqué. (In class, for the first quadrant, we appliquéd the purple shapes onto the background using a freezer paper template to prepare the fabric pieces; I then stitched those down by machine.)
I'm not big on embroidery either. For the Flower Garden blocks, I tried to do a little more than the pattern called for, but I know other folks would be much more elaborate.
After taking my photos, I saw that my blanket stitches, used on a few flowers, did not hold up well in the wash.
I used some 100wt thread in matching colors to tack the stitches back in place.
I used Latifa Saafir's chunky binding tutorial to do a 3/4" binding, and used a different color binding for each quadrant.
For the back, I used another texty print. This print would have matched the linen print that I rejected from the large triangles. The custom label is from Spoonflower.
I spent practically all of January 2025 doing the quilting. I'll close with more close-up images.
