squircle a day top, 2017 Marla Varner, pennylanequilts
needle turn applique, patchwork, squircles

Squircles

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In 2017, I decided to try another daily project. (I once tried the 100 day project, but only made it to Day 10…!) Inspired by some wonderful circle quilts by Sophie @lunalovequilts, I thought I could commit to creating one squircle a day for 365 days. I’d always wanted to try needleturn applique, so this seemed like a simple shape to practice that skill.

It was through Sophie  that I also found the #quilty365 page on Instagram, and a little more research lead me to this post by Audrey of Quilty Folk.

I decided to make it scrappy, and since I have over 25 years of scraps, I tried not to duplicate any fabrics. It was very entertaining to pair up interesting and unlikely fabric combinations for each block. (The background squares were cut at 4 inches, and the squircles were made from a 2.5 inch square.)

small design wall filled with squircles, Marla Varner
squircle blocks filling my small design wall

Each month I sewed the blocks into nine patch blocks. I didn’t want to have all of them to assemble at the end of the year! When the small design wall was full, we made a larger design wall.  Now I was able to lay out the blocks the full width of the quilt and I began to assemble the nine patches into rows. (Even though I wasn’t doing much manipulating of the blocks for design purposes, I needed to have the blocks up so I could see which fabrics had been used.)

For the most part, I completed a squircle a day. There were a couple of times that I got behind, like when I left my hand sewing kit in a hotel in Nebraska on our road trip to Paducah! But whenever I got off track, I tried to catch up as soon as possible.

My goal was to have the top assembled by midnight on New Year’s Eve and I am proud of myself for finishing with a few hours to spare! To make my layout (18 blocks x 21 blocks) work, I needed to make 13 extra squircles. That makes a total of 378 squircles x 2 background fabrics = 756 different scraps used. (Ooops, subtract 2 because a couple of duplicates sneaked in when I wasn’t looking!)

squircle a day top, 2017 Marla Varner, pennylanequilts

2018 brings an opportunity to do something new with squircles, so stay tuned to see version 2.0, using solids and pieced background blocks. So far, so good at completing a squircle a day in this new year.

15 thoughts on “Squircles”

    1. Aha! That is the question of the day! I would like to stitch straight lines on 1/4 ” on either side of the seam lines (but the quilt is too large to do that on my little machine) and I want to hand quilt the squircles. So I am trying to decide if I could fmq the background on the midarm and hand quilt the squircles. Not sure what design I would use for the free motion and if I am brave enough to tackle it. Any suggestions?

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  7. I must tell you how fabulous this quilt is! Love it very much and am really looking forward to the next one, which – I think – is even more spectacular than the first (if that is possible!)

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