Quiltingboard Forums - Patriotic Wedding Quilt- Lining up straight edges from circles for reversible quilt

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A number of you have asked about lining up the back which, after I mulled it over for a while, turned out to be not terribly hard at all. This quilt, first of all, was fraught with problems beginning with a pattern error which I missed, coupled with a miscalc of my own. The end result was I needed more red and blue fabric which was no longer available by the time I discovered it. To say I was frustrated would be a euphemism.

That, and that the constant repeat of circled was beginning to get boring to me, predicated the change. The dilemma? How to you go from circles to straight lines?

I hope I can articulate this well enough to give you an idea as I did not document the effort in pic's. When you join the two circles together, remember that the colored ring is on the back and your already-quilted square of fabric is on the front. You line up the sides of two circles, BACK TO BACK, seam a straight line and fold the excess to the front which forms the sides of the adjoining circles.

Using that same approach of BACK TO BACK, my center rings were already in a completed unit (except for the outside round edges. I made a double width of the next border (1-1/2" blue) and attached it carefully down the center of a 12" strip of white and carefully pressed it in half lengthwise. That defined the stitch line on the straight border to be added to the rounded edges. I matched that seam line to the seam lines on the rounded edges, inserted batting and quilted to within 1/2" of the now straight white border edge.

After that, I simply added like widths of alternating border colors separately to the front and back straight edges, inserted batting and quilted. It went very well as I was dealing only with the edges of the quilt with the remainder resting on the table area to the left of the machine. It also saved a great deal of the fabric and batting I had already precut for all the circles by re-cutting into straight-edge pieces.

Summarily: I made it up as I went along and was surprised it went to easily, everything lining up so nicely.

It went well enough that I might duplicate 3 or 4 of the rings which are so easy to quilt a block at a time and edge them off square for a reversible table runner, dresser scarf, etc.

Hope this made some sense, and thanks for your interest. ~Jo