Hi, I’m Natalie, from the Missouri Star
Quilt Company. Welcome to the intermediate quilt series. I wanted to show you how to
make this circles quilt that I found in American Patchwork and quilting. It’s the August
2009 edition and the quilt is called Dot to Dot. It’s very cute, and it can be made
using six yards of variety of fabrics. We used mainly Riley Blake, and some Sweet, and
a few other coordinating fabrics that we enjoyed, and it’s very easy to do! So, I will show
you how it’s done. For our quilt we used 12 ½” and 6 ½”
squares, but we think this would be very easy to adapt this to layer cakes and charm packs
as they are 10” and 5”. We’re going to show you how to use this Easy Circle Cut
Ruler by Sharon Hultgren to make our circles. But first we need to prep our fabric by putting
a piece of fusible webbing ironed on to the back side of your fabric. So, I’m going
to go over to the ironing board now and iron that on. OK we’re using Pellon’s Wonder
Under iron-on stabilizer and it comes by the yard. And we just cut a little piece about
6” square to iron on the back of our fabric. You just set your iron on it and hold it for
about ten seconds or so. And then you’re done! I want to explain the ruler, it has
a fabric fold line here, which is this dark line. So, when you take your fabric and fold
it in half, that is the line that you place on the fabric. Just like that. Now when you’re
doing a circle, to go in the middle of a square, I learned the hard way that you need to make
sure it’s about 2” smaller than your square. Because if you’ll notice here on these ones,
this one is 2” smaller and this circle is only 1” smaller which doesn’t leave you
enough seam allowance. So, 2” smaller than your square. So for our 6” circle or for
our 6” square we’re going to make a 4” circle and you can do this two ways. The instructions
on the back say that you can use your rotary cutter to cut the circle, and they recommend
using a much smaller one than the one we have. So, I’m going to use a pencil and just trace
the line and cut it out with a pair of scissors. I’m cutting out the circle, for our circle
square. And there you have a perfect little circle. It can go however you like it, you
can turn them or twist them. So, what we’re going to do is peel this backing off, and
then we’ll iron it on, and do a nice little blanket stitch around the edge, so, it’ll
look just like that when we’re done. OK, so you take your paper of the back and
then you place your circle. You can measure this, or you can just eyeball it. And then
you iron it on, it sticks nice and tight. Then we take it over to our sewing machine
to do our blanket stitch. To finish off the edges we chose to do the blanket stitch because
it’s nice and a pretty edge. But you can choose which ever stitch you like. So, here
we go. We’re going to go ahead and do this on the machine. We’re all done. See that there how it looks
nice and finished around the edges. We’ll clip the strings, and give it a good press,
and now you know the basic construction of the block. Now that you’ve seen how to make
the basic construction of the block, you can make this block in a variety of sizes. You
can make your large 12” squares, your smaller 5” or 6” squares. If you do make any of
these projects we’d love to see them in our forums and watch for us to make a quilt
in this same pattern out of a layer cake and charm pack that will be coming soon! Hope
you enjoyed our tutorial from the Missouri Star Quilt Company.
