Quilting My Circle Quilt

Here's the last sewing thing I wanted to share from my vacation:

I finally got to try out my mom's quilting frames, all set up with a cool Juki machine and a stitch regulator. 

I wasn't able to do what I'd envisioned for the circle parts of this quilt with my mom's machine, but I quilted all the background area. It was pretty amazing to see how fast it went and how much different it is to quilt this way compared with using a traditional machine. I had to keep reminding my brain to move the machine the way I wanted the stitches to go, not the opposite. I had some thread breakage issues which were frustrating, but overall I was happy with how it went.

This week, since we've been home from vacation, I started to feel a little anxious and scattered about all the projects I either have started or wish I had started. Amy posted about her new one thing, one week challenge, and that really got me thinking. I decided to focus on finishing up my circle quilt. 

I finished up the quilting this afternoon. I got the binding made the other day and will be doing the machine part of sewing it on today. Here's a close-up of the quilting in the circle:

I thought I was going to quilt it using the loopy flowers technique shared by Elizabeth at Oh, Fransson!, but decided to do a sort of carnation-y spiral to fill up the circles instead. I like it!

editing to add... here is the roundabout quiltalong post from A Commonplace Life that inspired this project. I needed to make smaller blocks for this baby quilt though, and here and here are my previous posts on designing the quilt and making a template for the quarter-circle block. If anyone is interested, I can also post about figuring out the yardage for this type of quilt and how to cut the segments and sew the blocks together. 

And... since I knew I wouldn't be able to quilt all the circles in one go, I gave myself a second focus project this week--charity quilt blocks.

The KC Modern Quilt Guild is working on a bunch of baby quilts for babies at a local hospital NICU. (Actually, the one my girl stayed in after she was born.) I am going to make a whole quilt top using these fabrics, and my goal was to finish 6 of them this week. I've made 2 more since this photo was taken, so I'm taking a break from them for a while. It has been really helpful to have just two things to focus on, knowing that my other projects are all written down in a list, and hanging out in their piles, and they won't go anywhere while I'm finishing other things. I'm looking forward to finishing the binding on the circle quilt so I can mail it off to my sister-in-law and start the quilting on my next finished quilt top!

It's been a while... I'm going to link this over at sew-n-tell Fridays--go see what everyone's been making this week!