As Chintz Circles is entered in this week’s contest at Quilting Gallery (and you can go vote here), I thought it might be sort of fun to look back at the process of making it. The picture above was taken almost immediately after I finished stitching down the binding but before it was washed.

But this is where it began back in late March of this year.  I used the Inklingo Orange Peel Deluxe collection to print all the Alabama Beauty shapes on the back of my fabrics, which makes a quilt like this so achievable!  No tracing of templates or worrying about matching points on curved seams — they were all there for me. Once I had determined I wanted to get that circle effect, I did have to be careful about my fabric placement.  When I got the first four blocks hand pieced by early April and saw the partial circles beginning to appear, I was thrilled.

By April 7,  2 complete circles had appeared.

By April 12, a total of 6 circles had appeared.

By April 21, 2010, there were 9 complete circles.

By April 26, a total of 12 circles had shown up.

Adding rows took a bit longer the larger it got, but by May 18 there were a total of 16 circles:

By the time the middle of June rolled around, it was up to 24 circles:

By June 21 a total of 30 circles had appeared, the hand piecing was completed and the top was finished.

Then the backing was found, the quilt was basted and the machine quilting began. By July 19, I had started tacking down the binding and the next day the picture shown at the top of this post was taken.

Then came the best part.  On August 1, 2010 the quilt was presented to my aunt on her 90th birthday.

Making Chintz Circles was a true labour of love and I owe thanks to Karen Dianne whose post inspired me to make the circles the predominant feature and to Linda Franz, the inventor of Inklingo, which I think is the best thing to happen in quilting since the rotary cutter and without which I doubt very much that I would have ever made Chintz Circles.

If you’ve stayed with me to the end of this post, please go to Quilting Gallery and vote!  You can vote here.