Come play and design with me…
In an earlier blogpost, I mentioned I had purchased a Flower Stitch Foot for my sewing machine. https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2025/12/30/flower-stitch-foot/. I haven’t had much time to play with it since I purchased it and I was a bit disappointed that it only made smaller circles, closer to 1” in diameter.
I was recently at a quilt retreat with my sister and she was working on a wall hanging that involved making 6” individual fabric circles. Her little gadget was called a Circular Embroidery Attachment. It got me thinking that I could machine stitch bigger circles onto fabric using my machine’s decorative stitches and could then integrate my smaller Flower Stitch Foot circles into the mix somehow. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on using this new attachment and got a few good pointers.
I took a 16” x 16” square of cotton lawn fabric and fused some ShapeFlex101 to it. I set the attachment to go as large as it would go. (10 ½”). I questioned my choice of stabilizer on the sample piece but I may want to do some hand stitching on this so I don’t want it to be too stiff.
I decided to begin with a straight stitch. I had to really watch and handle the sample to keep it from buckling. One YouTube tip said that your machine is trying to sew forward, not in a circular motion so your fabric may try to buckle. I also wasn’t sure if the end of the circle would match the beginning of the circle. (It was close). Probably if I had used a stronger stabilizer than the SF101, these two things might not have been an issue.
Then I thought I would try adding 4 circles to the inside of the big circle to see how finicky the tool was. I divided the sample into quarters and tried to find the centers for my attachment pin.
I used a compass and thought I did a good job, but once I stitched all four of them, I see they all overlapped. So much for precision…in hindsight I should have done this step differently.
Next, I thought I would try using some decorative stitches. I also decided that I would use a triatic color scheme of green, yellow and red violet. Starting off I thought I would focus more on the red violet color. I’m having difficulty getting the beginning and ending of the circle to line up. Hopefully that won’t be too noticeable as I progress.
I was attracted to the diamond shape in the middle so next I decided to stitch out from that as my middle point.
Wow, that yellow sure took over! I’ll keep going in circles with a variety of threads and stitches to see if I can tone that down.
Now I’m kind of liking what is happening with the center circle areas. I changed to my small Flower Stitch foot and tried putting those four small circles into the center area. I thought the first one was perfect. Then I couldn’t get the other 3 to cooperate at all. And look at how the original four circles are standing out saying LOOK AT ME. Some parts of this I like, other parts not so much.
Next, I tried using some Inktense pencils around the outer rick rack looking circle and in the center. I can’t quit seeing those 4 red violet circles…time to do some unstitching I think to see if I can get my eyes to focus on the other circle.
Outer stitches and center circles removed. Interesting…I’m feeling it calm down a bit and it is saving itself from being tossed into the waste bin.
Then I added a small velvet circle to the center.
Next, I got a bit braver and decided to paint some more areas with the Inktense pencils. I painted the inside circle and around the outside circle with red violet, next to the red violet rick rack in hopes of eliminating any white fabric once I cut it away from the white fabric. I intend to applique it to a different background fabric. Very carefully, I cut the whole circle out and fused some Wonder Under to it. Amazingly it was laying pretty flat!
It still seems too white to me.
Time to try out some background possibilities to see if that will help give me some direction to go with this. It’s amazing the ideas that crop up with all the different background colors.
Well, that was fun! I decided to go with the two tone piece at the end. Now to play with some added elements.
I cut out some ½” and ¾” circles with fusible on the back of them.
Still too much white for me so I decided to do some more painting. This time I used some textile paint, red and white and watered down quite a bit. I had no idea how the threads (cotton, rayon and polyester) or the fabric would react to the paint. I was worried about it running. I very carefully painted one circle round at a time and the threads did not pick up the paint. Yay! I left some white showing. I can always paint it later.
Now I need to decide how big I want it to be upon completion. The one above is 18” x 22”. I’m leaning towards this size versus the cropped size in the next photo. I think it recedes better on the larger size.
I may still add other elements to it before I quilt it. I may do some hand stitching, too.
It has been a challenging, fun experiment using my large circle attachment and working with the triadic pallet of green, yellow and red-violet. I think that the four circles that were giving me such grief in the beginning ended up bringing some interest and movement to the final circle. I was happy to be able to use a piece from my painted fabric stash as the background. And I can add this piece to my series of full moon quilts.
Thanks for playing along with me! I’ll try to remember to show you the finished piece in a future blogpost.
Happy Creating!
Tesi Vaara