A Tutorial for Framed Circles

 This post is especially for my daughter who needs to learn how to do this!   How do you sew that circle into that square with a hole in it?!  This might look complicated, but it's not if you just take it step by step. 

When you do circles (or curves), there should be templates with your pattern.  On those templates, there are usually marks that you need to transfer to your fabrics.  It's important to do this, so you can get the spacing for aligning and attaching your pieces. 

If there are no marks, you would simply make a a mark on your fabrics at the half, quarter, and maybe eighth (if it's a big piece) of the way around your curve. You would fold your piece in half, make a pencil mark to mark the point, then fold in half again for the quarter point, make your pencil mark, etc.  You would do this with both the circle, and the frame pieces.  Then you will be matching up those marks for pinning, and then sew.

My templates had marks already on them, and I did ransfer those marks onto the fabrics.  I used a Frixion pen (your marks iron right off!) for the lighter fabrics, and a gray chalk pencil for the darker fabrics.

 

To sew the circle into the hole, remember, RIGHTS SIDES TOETHER!  It seems too basic to state, but logic says,  put the circle on top of the hole, and somehow sew it there!  It seems counter-intuitive  to do it properly, but it needs to be that way, right sides together. 

Start by spreading out the frame.  Match a mark from the frame to a mark on the circle. (If orientation is important to your finished circle, make sure you match your marks accordingly.)  I want a certain color spike in the corner, so I will start there.  Match the marks, align the raw edges, pin.

Move to the next mark, and do the same.  Match, align, pin. Do not worry about aligning all the fabric all the way around just yet (see that yellow fabric sticking out in the picture below?)  You will align that little bit as you sew.  For now, just make sure your pins have the two raw edges aligned. You can add more pins later if you feel the need.

Continue going around the circle, matching your marks, aligning raw edges, and pinning the points.

I thought this needed more pins, so I added an extra pin between the marks to help hold it:  

 

front of circle                                  back of circle

 

Because I have really skinny points on these spikes, I am going to sew on the back of the circle so I can see where the tops of the points are.  Also, all of the paper pieced spikes have the seams going in the same way, and I want to cross those thick seams in the same direction.  You will want to sew slowly and as smoothly as possible, trying to follow the curve of the circle at the quarter-inch mark.  You can't see if puckers are forming on the backside, but you can feel your fabric as you sew, and often can feel if he fabric gets thicker.  Also, you can watch for "folds".  You can lift the fabric with the needle down to see if it is clear sailing ahead, or if you might have to smooth it out under there.  I did this often, every couple of inches.  If you see a fold, or a potential fold, stop sewing, and try to smooth it out before you sew over it. This is a slow process, but take way less time then having to pick out a pucker. When you finish sewing all around, check both sides for puckers.

As careful as I was, I still had one tiny pucker.  I picked out a few stitches and resewed.  

  

Press your seam carefully.  Press, don't iron.  Press means iron goes up and down, not sliding sideways. Ironing can stretch fabrics slightly, distorting it somewhat and this is especially true if there are bias edges.  Circles have 100% bias edges, so you don't want to stretch it out of round.  This would be easy to do with all those bias edges!  Also, do not use steam or spray starch.  Either could cause some shrinkage, which results in wrinkles or little "waves" in the fabric.

Here is the finished result:  

I hope this was helpful !

  

Round Two

 The second spikey circle of Beauty proved to be quite a bit easier then the first!  The paper piecing took a little longer as it was a bigger circle, but like I said earlier, the bigger the circles, the easier they are to sew.  So attaching it to the inner circle went well, even though I did have to pick out a couple small puckers..  Here is the second round of spikes:

The next step is to add corners to this circle to make it square.  I cut the fabric for the corners, sewed them into a square, and here is how it looks:  

Now to make that circle fit into that square's hole!
(I will go into detail on how I did that in my next post. )

Here it is!  Voila!

I'm gonna have to take my sewing machine into the Fix-It guy.  There are some mechanical problems that I need to take care of.  In the meantime, I can use my old faithful Brother machine to work on more of the paper pieces-- LOTS of spikes to make!

 

Jack the Ripper

 Beauty is going to be a really Challenging quilt!  I have re-done several parts of it, multiple times.  Perhaps it is the perfectionist in me, but I want it to be perfect!  My seam ripper is getting a lot of use! I have since decided that "good enough" will have to do!!  

The paper piecing is going well. The small tight circles are the problem. 

That center yellow appliqued circle turned out horrible! You can see that it is not round!  I edge stitched it because the applique stitch on my sewing machine is not working.  (What the H happened with that??)   I watched some YouTube videos on how to make a nice round applique and tried again, with much better results.  Jack the (seam) Ripper got into action and tore out the wonky circle.  I made a turning circle with freezer paper (watch the video to see how and why,) HAND SEWED the new yellow circle into place, and proceeded with the next step, adding the black ring.

Again, the result were not satisfactory.  So many puckers in the black ring!  I tried to iron them out.  Big mistake.  You cannot iron out a pucker-- you HAVE to pick the stitches out, and rearrange the fabric! Also, in the process of ironing, and not getting the pucker to lay flat, I tried some spray starch to "help."  Bad bad bad!  After I did that, the fabrics wrinkled even worse, and I completely gave up at that point.  Walked away.  But a few days of absence allowed that frustration to dissipate, and I was able to climb back into that saddle and, as my 5 year old grandson would say, "Try again!"

The yellow circle stayed (I had already replaced the wonky center circle with a new, more "round" one), but I had to completely remove the black ring and make a new one.  By redoing all these sections, I am hoping it will not come back to bite me at the end when I run out of fabric because I made two of everything at this stage!  I am not worried about the black fabric.  I have plenty of "Amish Black" and it's a common fabric, so it's easy to buy more.  But these rainbow batiks... that's another story.  I suppose I could get more with a close enough color that it might not be noticeable.  I am hoping that this quilt kit will have enough extra fabric built in for mistakes like these.  Some wiggle room in the yardage.  I did another quilt kit by this same designer, Jacqueline DeJonge, and if I recall correctly, there was plenty enough fabric to recover from an error or two.  Anyway, I finally got it all sewed together, and it's much better.  Not perfect, but decent.  I'm really glad I took the time to redo it.  I feel so much better about it all, and am ready and enthusiastic to continue with the next spikey circle!

The next circle should be easier because it's larger, and the curves won't be so tight.