Circles and Stripes

by Kim Harris
(Brsibane, Queensland, Australia)

This quilt was made as a gift for my new nephew, and is quilt number 8 for me.

I had been given one large piece of screen printed cotton (the dots) and while it was not big enough to use as a quilt on it's own, I did not want to cut it up too much given the scale of the quilt. Instead, I cut it into 3 strips, and used the blues of the print to incorporate solids in the same tones to make it square.

As the screen-printed material was 150cm wide, I couldn't just use a width of solid colour to make the strips (as the solids were 90cm), hence I made the decision to make the stripes you see on the finished design.

It was machine pieced and machine quilted myself on a quilting frame. I used a light blue cotton to quilt the entire quilt as I wished to make the piecing the feature of the quilt rather than the quilting. The binding was hand made in the four colours of solids I used on the top. I did this in stripes again to tie back to the stripes on the quilt, and also to avoid a strong solid edge which could potentially detract from the dots.

It's not completely square despite my best efforts which was because of the stretch of the fabric due to the length of each strip. I had to unpick all the strips once and resew as I matched them end to end but as they were different lengths, the quilt did not lay flat originally.

It was quick and easy to put together and required minimal planning, so was very fun to do.