I finished the little quilt that I was working on where I made the circle portion while playing with my circle attachment and my sewing machine’s built in stitches. It started off like this:

And by the end of my July 2026 blog post looked like this:

Here is a link to the July blog post if you are interested in reading about how I got this point…https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2026/07/25/more-circle-play/

It had been hanging on my design wall since I finished that blog post so I thought I had better get it finished. I have a series of Full Moon quilts that I’ve been working on for several years now and I thought this piece could become a good candidate for that series. Since I already started using my “tile” method I decided to continue with that method. By ‘tile method” I mean that I cut out shapes from fabrics that have been fused to Wonder Under, all raw edge, and then iron them to a background once I find the perfect fabrics for my project.

My other Full Moon quilts usually have a solid-colored background that I completely fill with tiles, so this one added a few new challenges for me because of that busy background. And I was still dealing with the “in your face” white portion of the circle.

My first decision was to get rid of the white. I printed out a couple photos and using my colored pencils, I tried yellow, green and red violet over the white.

I liked the yellow the best. I was surprised with that choice, well aware of how bright it would be in that proportion. I then used an Inktense pencil with aloe vera on the fabric piece to set it off (the aloe vera keeps it from running hither and yon).

Yep, quite bright. Now I need to figure out how to try to calm it down.

The yellow is still quite bright after adding some additional tiles around and inside it, but a full moon can be bright too!

At this point I felt that I had enough tile pieces but I still felt that it needed additional elements that would help move the eye around the piece.

I added some hand painted organza pieces and some of the leftover fabric that I had cut my tiles from.

 

I kept experimenting with elements and color and finally decided to call it done although I did make a few tweaks to it before I started quilting it.

 

At this point I have all the tiles stitched down.  In this photo I have safety pins holding the unquilted layers together. I try to travel between tiles if possible so I don’t have to keep picking up the needle and moving to another area. I had quite a few thread changes for this piece.  Now I need to figure out how to quilt the rest of it. Unfortunately, I had to stop and place an online thread order because even though I have 30+ colors of green in various weights, not one of them satisfies me. Guess that gives me more time to think about what I want to quilt into the remaining spaces. So sorry, but my thread won’t arrive in time for me to finish quilting this before this blog post is due. I’ll try to remember to post a photo on my next blog once I get it completed.

I decided to call this piece Strawberry Moon. It brings back memories of strawberry fields and picking flats of berries during the summer months.

This was a fun and challenging project and I learned a lot while working on it. It made quite the transition from start to finish!

Here are some of my other Full Moon quilts in the series.

Harvest Moon   2017   32 1/4″ W x 39 1/2″ H

Flower Moon   2019    22 1/4″ W x 30 1/2″ H

Blue Moon   2020   22 1/4″ W x 30 1/2″ H

Snow Moon    2022    32 1/2″ W x 37 3/4″ H

Each of these have been juried in to various quilt shows over the years. I hope you enjoyed seeing them.

Happy creating!

Tesi Vaara