I recently finished making a fun yet chaotic quilt backing from leftovers of my colorful fabrics. I’m calling the quilt Colorful Chaos and it was a fun experiment in learning to piece inset circles. You can see the image of the front pinned to the design wall next to the backing.

This is my 3rd post in a series about making this quilt. It’s been wonderful to sew on between other “work” projects, without a strict deadline. Click below to read about parts 1 and 2, written before I finally designed on a name for this quilt:

Part 1 – Making Soul-Fulfilling Work
Part 2 – Piecing Inset Circles

Here’s a little bit about the process of making the pieced backing, which was just as much fun to make as the front! First of all, I gathered up misc. leftover scraps that didn’t make it to the front of the quilt. I had 3 circles left over after I cut them out of the quilt top and a bunch of low volume scraps that I used for the backgrounds of each circle.

For the pink unit, I pieced a background square with fabric missing from the middle since that would be cut away anyway. I cut a circular hole from the middle that was 1″ smaller than the pink circle. I very carefully pinned and sewed it around the pink colorful circle. (See part 2 above for a more detailed explanation of this process).

Then I repeated that a few times for the other colors I had, including more of the blue, plus a chunk of dark grey improv which didn’t end up working on the front. I also made way more low volume pieces that I needed, so I gathered up all these starter bits and pieces and threw them on my design wall to begin a secondary composition.

I put some blue painters tape on the design wall to set the boundaries for how big the backing needed to be. Once I decided on the placement of the circles, I started randomly filling in the gaps with low volume strips and rainbow colored strips, leftovers from my various fabric collections.

This part of the process gave me complete freedom to just play and see what happened. I had no real plan in mind which is half of the fun of improv piecing. I used both front and back of my various low-volume fabrics. My philosophy is that you paid for both sides of the fabric so you may as well use them!!

The hardest part about this type of piecing is keeping everything relatively square. I do what I call the “puzzle” method where I piece together sections at a time and make sure the sizes fit together before sewing. Sometimes that means trimming off a bit or adding onto another section, but it all works out in the end!

Here are a couple of my go-to improv piecing techniques: sewing together similar sized strips to create a band of color, making stair-step panels and filling them in with contrasting background fabrics; cutting half square triangles from improv patchwork and joining them with other colors.

I also get asked a lot how I sort my scraps. Rather than cutting them to size, I sort them all into bins by color. My bins fit into rolling drawers in my fabric storage shelving unit. Whenever they start overflowing, that tells me it’s time to start a new quilt, LOL!

If you’d love to stock up on fun rainbow fabrics along with some low volume neutrals – check out my current stock of fabrics I’ve designed at Shop.ChristaQuilts.com. It’s been fun to mix pieces from all of the various collections I’ve designed!

Stay tuned as I’ll be sharing a couple more posts, showing how I basted and machine quilted this colorful quilt!