This pattern, Bulls-Eye, presented me with a number of challenges. The hand appliqué discussed in my post last week on September 12, 2014 was the first one. That went beautifully.

Carolyn Freidlander has three Bulls-Eye quilts in her book, Savor Each Stitch. One is quilted with vertical lines and the other have some radiating quilting a linear quilting in grids. She does a bit of echo quilting of the bulls-eye next to a portion of each semi-circle in one quilt.

I thought this was the perfect quilt to finally get a handle on the art of circular quilting. I discussed that in a post in August, "Skills: Quilting Circles". This quilt gave me ample opportunity to practice! I really like the final result!

I did a bit of tight radiating quilting in one circle. And I outlined some of the very pale green sections using Sashiko hand quilting with a purple pearl cotton thread, seen in the photo above and again in the photo below.

Detail, Bulls' Eye to show the circular quilting

This quadrant has a more open radiate quilting pattern in the upper left part of the inner circle and a grid pattern in the lower right section. That grid is randomly following a pale blue graph paper grid--the fabric is from Carolyn's Architexture fabric line.

There is nothing speedy about doing circular quilting with the lines 1/2 inch apart. It took me days to quilt this little lap quilt! I was able to turn the quilt for the innermost circle around the qpplique, but after that, each line had to stop 2-4 times before the full circle was completed. That left lots of threads to bury. Clover's self-threading needles are the only thing that made the task of burying threads do-able. I highly recommend them for this!

This has been such a great design to learn new skills and learn new ways to improve old skills. I thought I'd never make any of the quilts in Carolyn Freidlander's book, Savor Each Stitch. But I am so happy I made this one!

Addendum: Found this comment from Carolyn Freidlander on my Instagram @sleepingdogquilts feed this morning:

"Whoa, this looks amazing!! And the quilting is fabulous!!"

I'm floating on Cloud 9 right now!!