Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!! Of course we're celebrating the big day! We are having circle foods for every meal - and pie of course! And I always make a Pi Day quilt! This is my sixth year of Slice of Pi Quilts, and this is my sixth Pi Day quilt!

Take a look back at all the Pi Day quilts I've made! 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021

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This year's Pi Day quilt started with a single square of solid black fabric. I pressed some Heat-N-Bond Lite to the back (though in hindsight, I should have used Lite Steam-A-Seam 2), and got out my Olfa Circle Rotary Cutter.

I use this circle cutter SO often! (I just used it a couple weeks ago to make this buttons quilt!)

I marked a dot in the center of the square, then I set the cutter to the biggest circle and cut. Then I adjusted the cutter to be 1/4" smaller and cut another circle. I kept adjusting it, 1/4" at a time, and cutting circles until I had quite a collection! All of these were cut from just ONE 10" square!

I peeled the paper off the back of the rings and arranged them onto a quilt sandwich made with Art Gallery solid white fabric on top, Warm & White batting inside, and a scrap piece of backing fabric.

Then I dug through my stash of solids to find a mix of really bright colors of Kona.

Next, I took a piece of the Heat-N-Bond Lite and placed it on top of the quilt top. I traced each section where the circles overlapped, drawing the line in the center of the solid black ring fabric. I numbered these as I went so I wouldn't get them out of order.

A quick press of each shape onto the solid colors...

...and then I cut them out with scissors.

I was able to carefully slide the colored bits under the rings.

Once in position, I pressed them in place with my mini iron.

At this point, I was really giddy that the process was working! I pin basted the sandwich so I could quilt it on my Juki machine.

I quilted straight vertical lines, and used the edge of the foot as a guide for the spacing.

I used 50wt white Aurifil thread for the quilting. It adds a great texture to the quilt, but didn't take away from the colored circles. You can see the white stitches on top of the black rings if you look closely, but I'm just ignoring those. My husband think I should use a black Sharpie to color them to match the rings, but I haven't decided on that yet.

I did not want the binding to be a distraction from the design of the quilt, so decided a solid white binding was the best choice. I machine sewed it on - tutorial HERE. 

I even remembered to sew in one of my labels when I sewed the binding on!

This was such a fun quilt to make!

I  haven't sewn just for fun in quite awhile, so this was a great exercise for my brain!

My oldest two boys helped hold the quilt up on the neighbor's house so I could take pictures. 

I'm going to let this one sit around for a bit, but I'm thinking I might enter it into QuiltCon next year. I don't normally make quilts for shows, but this one is modern enough that it just might fit in there! I love the balance of bright colors and negative space!

Now I'm off to make some circle foods and celebrate the day! What are you doing to celebrate Pi Day today??

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If you liked this post, you may also like these:

It's Time for Pi

Pi Day Mini Quilt

Happy Pi Day!!