Concentric Circles

While I was quilting the concentric circles pattern on my genome quilt I had a few people ask me how I marked the circles, so I thought I would put together a post explaining the method that I used.

As I wanted my circles to be perfectly concentric, evenly spaced and for all the circles in the quilt to be the same sizes, I made myself a cardboard template. The card I used was some medium thickness card that I got from an art supplies store. The store I went to was actually very generous - I went in and explained what I needed the card for and the guy said he knew exactly what to suggest and showed me the card I ended up getting, which was just right. I asked him how much it was and he said free! Apparently the card is actually the packaging that the fancy paper that they get comes in and they throw it away anyway! Score!

Anyway, since I wanted my circles to get quite big I needed to fashion some kind of compass - for which I used a blob of bluetac and a map-pin to be my central pivot point, and then I taped some stay tape to a pencil, which I would use to measure the radius of the circle. I did however find that the stay tape stuck to the bluetac, so I put a bit of paper between the tape and the bluetac and it worked perfectly. In the picture below you can see me marking the circles on the card, I made my lines 2 inches apart. To maximise the size of the circles I could draw, I just made a template for half the circle.

I then needed to cut along the lines to make it into a template - I cut out every other half circle arch, as shown in the photo below. To make sure that the centres of my circles stayed in the same place I kept a thin strip along the edge to hold all the arches in the same places. I also marked the centre of my circles so that I could place the template over it when I moved it to draw the other half.

I then drew around the circles with my washable pencil

I chose pink lead because it would show on the white, blue and green fabrics in the quilt

And then lastly I stitched along my traced lines.

I didn't mark the whole quilt at once, I did a couple of patches of circles at a time, starting in the middle and working my way out in each direction until I'd filled all the spaces.