Piecing / Insetting circles

today I'll show you a quick tutorial on how to inset a circle so you'll have a background the cut a hole in you cut a circle and you piece it right in blood people think that circles need to be applique but the advantage of piecing circles and setting them like this is it gives you a nice smooth crisp finished piece and it's not that hard so today we're going to inset this green circle into this off-white square it's a twelve inch square that I've prepared it by cutting a six inch hole the circle itself is seven inches so when it goes in the finished size is going to be six and a half inches in diameter you have a quarter of an inch a quarter of an inch a quarter of an inch a quarter of an inch with the seam allowances so when that's all done it'll be six and a half finished so if you're trying to do a circle and if you know the finish size of the circle let's see six and a half inches add half an inch to the piece you put in and subtract half an inch from the piece you're putting it into so what I'm going to do next is make registration marks I'm folding this you see nice crisp half circle and finger pressing so that I have a very clear see that very clear mark and I'm going to fold the other direction and do the exact same thing and this is going to give me an indication of quarters so I've got one two three four nice quarters they mean to the exact same thing with the circle and I'm actually folding this on the grain so that my fold marks are staying in the same direction as the grain so that when it gets pieced in all of the grain is going the same direction for both the circle and the square so now I have my nice marks on all of this and this can be a little confusing but you're you always piece right sides together and I know these are solids but let's pretend we've got a race on the right side so I'm gonna flip it over and what I've done is I've aligned my marks my folded registration marks really nicely there and then I'm going to flip this over and fold lining these up I'm gonna just eyeball my registration marks and pin those just like that and then I'm going to fold this over so I'm basically folding right sides together and pinning what that's going to give me is four pins one at each of the four folds and any circle over about five inches in diameter okay over six inches is pretty forgiving you don't have to be perfect but you want to be close so it looks a little messy because everything is tucked together and this is just the start we've got four pins but this is what I think is the coolest part I'm now going to pick up two of these pins and bring them together and when I do that I can find the halfway point and finger press getting that really good and getting it this here I'm gonna finger press and get that really crisp and so I'm going to take my two little pinched marks and I'm gonna bring them together and put a new pin there and what this does is it gives me a pin at the halfway point I'm going to go around to the other ones and pinch that in half go under pinch that in half and because they're nicely pinched they actually nest one inside the other very easily and it may be a little awkward the first time you do it but you'll get the hang of it after a couple I work my way around - and you may notice as you're watching this and I'm using flour headpins everyone has their own preferences but I find that clover flower head pins are the easiest to work with because they're thin and they have nice sharp points and they're they're less bulky than a lot of the traditional glass head pins so now what this does is it gives me eight pinned points some people like to pay me even more if you like to you can subdivide again and find the middle between any two pins but I find that for a circle of this size eight is kind of a good number to use so now I'm going to change the camera angle and let you zoom in and see how we actually how I go through - so this and maintain a nice quarter inch seam allowance you know so now I'm going to sew these together and one of the very important first steps is to make sure that you have your circle side if you look at this the circle naturally wants to go flat and the other the outer part has a lot of excess fabric so we're going to sew with the circle down that will help prevent tucks and I'm going to go in and using a walking flip but if you don't have one it doesn't much matter you can I just think that it helps keep things from shifting but this is the key if you look I'm going to be trying to keep my seams aligned so I'm going to take a moment to kind of just pull out the seams and I'm going to start right blow in and I've got a quarter inch mark on my walking foot and I'm going to put my needle down and I'll explain a bit more of what I'm doing as I go along but I'm trying to feed in my fabrics keeping them neatly aligned and turning slowly and I'm keeping an eye right here where the needles going in because my quarter inches from here I'm feeding it into the quarter inch but I'm trying to make sure that I keep that quarter inch distance right where the needle goes in because sometimes when there's a curve you have a tendency to curve away and not actually remember that the quarter inch needs to be up here where the needle goes in because if it's marked at your foot down here you could just kind of make a little mistake so I'm gonna go and I pull out my pins as I go along you don't want to have a needle break and fly into your eye so make sure you pull your pins as you go and there may look like there are some little Tufts as long as they're to the left of the seam allowance they're actually going to be fine I'm not sewing over any tucks there's excess fabric to left but that's really gonna smooth out in a minute so I'm going to go around that keep going and I use my fingers to stabilize if you wanted to do more pins it would be more soon about to begin with but I find that it's a small enough circle that this is all the pins I need to okay keep going smooth it out because circles are naturally on the bias they're going diagonally more or less and what I just did here is I lifted my presser foot to smooth out the excess but because circles are on the bias there's a natural stretch which is why they're a little more forgiving people are often afraid of curves but that that natural bias gives you wiggle room that is very nice okay I'm just smoothing and if you happen to sew a tuck in it happens now and then it's not a big deal you can go out go back afterwards with your seam ripper and take that out and I'm not going to fast forward through this I'm actually gonna have you see me go all the way around because you can see each time how I have to kind of pull and adjust try to get everything to line up I'm just smoothing it out as I go sometimes I actually use a pin to pull the top fabric over if I just need to know it so I'm actually about 3/4 of the way around already it's smooth out that excess occasionally lifting up my presser foot I know they sell all kinds of gadgets curved piecing feet things like that I don't think any of that's necessary just a few pins and a little patience is what you need to do a good curve so before you splurge on a special presser foot just try it without I think it'll be just fine okay I'm getting near the end overlap a bit cut that and you'll see I've got a nice quarter inch all the way around and it looks all wrinkly around the edge but what you're gonna find is all of these little creases that happened while you were sewing they're outside they're not actually sewn into the into the seam itself so I'm gonna move over to the ironing board and you'll see what happens when I press this open now that we have the circle inset I'm going to press it open we press all of our seams open it makes everything live very flat some people prefer to press to the side but I think you'll see the advantage of this when I get going so I so I have okay now I have my inset circle and all the seams are facing up we press our seams open and flat rather than to the side because we like the flat graphic quality that gives I've warmed up my iron and I'm using a steam iron with the steam setting off this iron has a burst Aseem feature which I like and I'm going to go in here kind of coax the seam open and this iron has a nice beak that's one of the things I look for in any iron I get is good steam and a nice fine beak because it lets me really go in and easily press seams open and I'm going around if you've done garment sewing you often know that you have to notch seams so they display open with quilting cotton if your circle is five or six inches in diameter or larger there is enough give in the cotton that you usually do not have to notch I think I can just kind of press it I need to make my way around and I occasionally impressing my steam button to force some steam in there I'm going around so but if you like to notch you could not I just find that the hazard of notching and sometimes it makes your gives you little flat spots in your finished piece that go round and touch it up when I flip it over I press it from the top again you'll see everything smooths out very nicely and because I've pressed it open and not the side it makes one nice layer and you have an incredibly flat Christmas circle

Channel: Modern Quilt Studio

Views: 49,223

Rating: 4.9247556 out of 5

Keywords: modern quilt studio, modern quilt, bill kerr, weeks ringle, piecing, quilting, inset circles

Id: oK4Wv1l61J0

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2015