Quick Christmas Quilts and a Trick!

These are my new quick Christmas quilts- patterns here.

You see they come in pairs…

It was DOUBLE FUN but NOT DOUBLE WORK!

The designs and the techniques I used just REWARD you with applique pieces for a second quilt- without any effort from your part, without additional fabric or time. All you need is one more background fabric.

The pieces are small – 14”, and SO MUCH FUN to sew!

Squares, hexagons, circles…

The pattern includes 18 designs, even octagons.

Not only you prepare the tops in record time…

The quilting is the EASIEST and QUICKEST you could do! Even a child could sew a spiral, with the walking foot, on such small quilt.

And if you aren’t fond of raw edges, you could cover them with a fine zig zag stitch. Everything in ONE CONTINUOUS STITCHING!

Don’t you LOVE perfect circles? A distorted circle is so unpleasant to the sight! Years ago I made a round quilt that ended up a little distorted and I was so dissapointed! Since then, I constantly avoided working with this shape.

Until now! I found a hack that makes perfect circles! It works for my designs and probably for other designs too.

The idea is simple: you use the original circle design as a template. When the quilting is done and after you wash the quilt (if you need to wash the quilt) just center the circle template over your quilt and trace the circle. You have now a perfect edge to finish your quilts.

Because my designs have a center circle, I cut it out and to be sure that the template is always centered, all I have to do is to match the hole of the template to the center circle of the quilt.

And here is the second part of this little trick- SO IMPORTANT- you can apply this to ANY TEMPLATE.

After quilting and washing, most quilts shrink. The original circle template could be too big for your need so here is how to make a smaller circle.

Remove the thread from your sewing machine and stitch through paper, inside the circle, at 1/8” from the edge (or whatever distance you need). Stitching at 1/8” will give you a circle that is 1/4” smaller than the original.

Then cut on the stitched line with scissors. If you sew with very small stitches, you don’t even need scissors, you just tear the paper away.

Isn’t this great? In the same way, you can reduce the size of any template, in any shape. Just stitch inside the template.

You can use the same trick if you need bigger templates. If you sew garments or bags, sometimes the pattern says you have to add seam allowances to some templates. To do this, this time you just have to roughly cut around the template and then stitch outside the edge of the template, at the desired distance from the edge.

I hope this helps! I know that round designs don’t scare me anymore!