Part of my quilt idea backlog has been the idea of a quilt with circles in its design. This would be the fourth quilt in a four-part series. The first one is made of squares and rectangles, and they remind me of a calendar, especially the way that the rectangles make me think of the way the calendar on my computer shows an “all day event” that lasts for several days. If you looked at this quilt without talking to me first, you wouldn’t see anything about it as a calendar; you’d just see a bunch of squares and rectangles. All of the first three quilts in this sequence (two of them are done and on the bed right now, the third one is still a work-in-progress; I need to decide if I should buy some pink fabric and applique on some cherry blossoms) are based on straight-sided shapes, and I don’t have that much experience sewing with circles. And circles remind me of clocks (because I am old and because math-contest-obsessed middle school children need to know how to find the angle between the hands of a clock), and I think that clocks might be a good way to end a series that started with calendars.

Since one of my friends had a baby last month, I’m trying out some ideas, and I’m going to turn the blocks that I make into a quilt for her baby. Sure the baby has already been born, but I’m told that babies don’t sleep under blankets until they are bigger. And I suspect that babies ruin things and need new things every now and then.

I have some ideas for structuring the blocks. I’m going to make the quilt out of red and blue fabric because I already own a lot of red and blue fabric, and I am not buying any more craft supplies unless I really can’t avoid it. Some of the blocks will just be boring patchwork, too, because I already have a bunch of leftover squares that I already cut out for other projects.

My secret plan

Yesterday I made the first of the circles. I’d like to pretend that I’m going to make a block a day and be done with the quilt top in roughly two weeks, but with daylight stealing time upon us, I no longer get up sufficiently early to do as many things before going to work. Also I had to put a lot of the sewing stuff away so that Roomba could vacuum.

The first circle