Circles, Revisited

My batik circle quilt is not one of the better quilts I have made.  Technically, it is rather a mess.  The blocks were so irregular in size that it took a lot of fiddling to get the quilt to come together at all, the circles don’t all lie flat, and there is puffiness in a number of places that I doubt will quilt out.  Despite all that, it may end up being one of my favorite quilts.  It has some of my favorite fabrics, and there is something about the flow and contrast of color that I love.

This week I started quilting it.  It is my first quilt with Quilter’s Dream batting, and I am loving how soft it is.  My vision was to fill each circle with detailed, unique quilting, and to contrast it with linear channels and stippling in the background    However, that created two dilemmas. First, I love quilting, and have a tendency to quilt my quilts to death, but I will lose the wonderful softness of the batting, at least until the quilt has been washed extensively.  The second issue is that the blocks are so irregular, and I am afraid the regular design in the background will emphasize the irregularity of the blocks.

My quilt tester approves of the quilt.

In the end, though, I went ahead with the design anyway.  I just couldn’t let go of the idea of the heavily quilted, flowing circles and the contrasting regular background.

There are 20 blocks in the quilt, and so far I have quilted about 7 or 8 of them.  I tend to be of the school, ‘Don’t practice, make quilts”, and I rarely unstitch, unless the mistake is really glaring.  But so far I have picked out most of two blocks of quilting as well as redone a few seams that just were not going to hold.  One block I picked out was an attempt to make a spiral free hand. A complete disaster, so I picked it all out and used a walking foot instead.  The result is still far from what was in my mind, but somewhat better.  Another was inspired by the quilting on the image in the Inspiration widget at the bottom of the page.  My version was so far from that picture that I couldn’t leave it.  It is at times like this that using rulers sounds very appealing!

Here are a few blocks, and a picture of the quilt back, which will almost be a second quilt.

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I’m linking up to Let’s Bee Social and Work in Progress Wednesday, once it is Wednesday where it is being hosted!  Also linking up to Quilter in the Closet’s Building Block Tuesday, because what I have mainly been doing is getting specific blocks quilted.