Approximately eighteen months ago, I was visiting a quilting friend and noted he was working on a pattern that I had tried previously called Ring Cycles. I had only made a table runner because it involved a large number of "Y seams", and I had gotten frustrated sewing those by machine. We talked about all the Y seams, and he mentioned he was going to try sewing the rows together by hand which would be much easier. That got me to thinking, what if I did a combination of piecing methods. I was looking for a new "forever project", meaning one like my applique projects that I could carry around with me and that would be more complex than my usual machine pieced quilts. I also wanted to try English Paper Piecing but wasn't ready to commit to a large EPP project. I decided to make the centers of the rings using EPP as a test, the small 9 patches by machine, and put the entire thing together with hand piecing. I made about 300 small 9 patches using scraps from my stash during a retreat weekend, then started on the EPP. The entire quilt was completed earlier this summer and is displayed prominently in my sewing room. A friend helped me find the perfect border fabric which I pattern matched and mitered the corners. I decided I had spent so much time piecing that the quilt deserved a fiddly border too. I had a lot of fun with EPP stars but I admit I did eventually get tired of sewing the white triangles by hand. Still much easier to match the intersections by hand than by machine. I do love the optical illusion of this pattern which is a variation of the traditional Jack's Chain pattern. I machine quilted using my long arm with some basic outline stitching as I wanted the piecing to be the focus. And I do plan to enter it in my guild's next quilt show.
Details of some of the stars, the quilting and border fabric.
