Dizzy Dog Quilting and Knitting: Kaffe Circles Quilt Top Finished

Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here. Although it continues to be hot and dry, we have luckily not had any fires close by. My heart goes out to all of the people who are dealing with the fires and with the flooding. It's certainly sobering when I look at my Watch Duty app and see all of the fires affecting the western states!

This week I pulled out my Kaffe Circles quilt top. This quilt is made with Kaffe Fassett fabrics along with a solid. I wanted to get this top finished because I'm using all different Kaffe fabrics in the blocks so I had piles of my Kaffe fabric around my sewing room so I could keep track of which fabrics had been used and which hadn't. I started this quilt top in a Linda Reinhert workshop at my quilt guild and have made a few blocks here and there since. I had some time this week, so I made the final push and finished the quilt top. The blocks in this quilt are made up of inset pieced circles.

Kaffe Circles - Sample Block

The instructor had us sewing the inset circles using only 8 pins evenly spaced around the circle, but I found that I needed 16 pins. I guess I'm a control freak! It dawned on me this week that it might be easier to use clips instead of pins when sewing the circles because the clips are easier to use and they hold the fabric together only at the seam line, which is the only place on the pieces that you are sewing where the pieces are the same size.

Kaffe Circles - Using Pins

Kaffe Circles - Using Clips Instead of Pins

I found that the problem with using clips is that you have to stop sewing and remove the clip in front of the clip, about 1/2" before the needle, because the foot can't go over the clip. With pins I could sew right up to the needle so the fabrics were held in place better. So I discarded this idea and went back to using pins. After sewing, I pressed all of the seams towards the solid fabric.

Kaffe Circles - Pressing Towards Solid Fabric

I did this because I wanted the solid circles to be in the foreground. It's subtle, but this does make a difference. I wanted the quilt to have 30 blocks and had already finished 17 blocks, so I had 13 blocks left to complete this week.

Kaffe Circles - New Blocks

The blocks were slow to complete (again, I'm a control freak), but once they were finished it was quick work to put them together into a quilt top!

Kaffe Circles

It's nice to have this top finished so I can put away my Kaffe fabrics! I still need to prepare the binding and start thinking about the backing.

I've also made some progress on my Sisters Nine Patch leader/ender project designed by Bonnie Hunter. I made a bunch of progress on these blocks week before last when working on the backing for my Prickly Pear quilt, but forgot to include that in my blog post. This week I couldn't use leaders/enders when piecing the circles, but was able to make a little more progress on the leader/ender project while sewing the circle blocks together.

Sisters Nine Patch - Progress

I now have 112 of the 169 blocks finished and have a start on the remaining 57 blocks. I need to cut some more green squares for this quilt and can use some of the leftovers from my Kaffe Circles fabrics.

In the evenings, I made some progress on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I'm almost finished with the second large rosette and I really wanted to get it finished. This week I was able to finish four of the units for the final round of the rosette.

La Passacaglia - Units

I only have one more of these units to put together, then I can add these to the rosette.

Finally, I also made some more progress on my Winter Vespers needlepoint kit from Bernat.

Winter Vespers

I'm not sure what I'll do with this when it's finished, but I'm really enjoying working on it!

Before I go, I wanted to share a little tidbit. A couple of weeks ago when preparing fabric for the Susan Cleveland workshop, my iron got really dirty. I starched the fabric, which I don't usually do but it was part of the instructions for the workshop. I used my backup iron, just in case, and I was happy that I did because the iron was coated with cooked starch when I finished. It was terrible and I was glad I used a backup iron! I tried cleaning the iron with the old Faultless iron cleaner that I've had for years (decades??), but it had no effect on the starch. Sorry, I didn't think to get a picture of the dirty iron but it was terrible and I was afraid I wasn't going to get it off. I looked for some iron cleaners on Amazon to try and found Mr. Iron and got some to try.