Every year Kate form Tall Tales from Chiconia makes a quilt to be raffled for an ovarian cancer charity. It’s always a teal colour as that is the colour for ovarian cancer ( much like pink is for breast cancer) and the theme is always a play on the word teal, such as Time for Teal. This year it’s Teal’s on Fire, a play on Wheels on Fire, so think teal with highlights of orange. There’s a group of us quilters around the world who make a block or two for Kate, post it off, and then she puts them all together and makes a wonderful quilt.

I offered to make two blocks. I looked through my batik stash and realised my teal pile was getting rather small. I found a page on etsy that sold bundles of fat quarters and there was a bundle of four teal coloured ones, perfect! Even more perfect was the ombre fabric I spotted on the same page, a batik going from golden yellow at one side to deep orange at the other. I ordered 25cm and it’s ideal, it gives me a variety of colours from one fabric!!

My first idea with the theme was inspired by one of the next blocks I have to do for my Owl and Hare Hollow quilt, it’s a large circle made from four fabrics surrounded by eight little circles. I initially thought I’d do the centre of the big circle in teal batiks, maybe surrounded by a narrow circle of orange, then eight teak mini circles. However by the time I came to make it I’d decided to have a thin outer circle in a dark plain teal so it looked a bit like the rim of a wheel and surround it with the little circles in orange.

I didn’t take any progress shots, but the central circle looked a bit meh, the batiks were too alike. At this point I had my orange circles cut out and pressed (I remembered Sarah Fielkes tip to wrap the fabric round a template in tinfoil and press!) I thought maybe a narrow strip of binding across the seams of the circle…two strips turned into four to make the eight spokes of a wheel. I then had the dilemma of how to finish the ends..I then had a flash of inspiration and continued them under the outer circles, so it makes it into a wheel of fire!!

My other flash of inspiration was to draw the mini circles with a frixion pen first, it helped position them accurately but also gave me a stitching guide. I shall do that again!

So here is my first block complete…

I love the different fiery shades of orange!

My only bit of concern with the block now is that the centre point is pretty thick! Luckily the plain teal fabric is pretty thin, not the usual quilt-weight cotton. There is the option to remove the back circle of batik if necessary as I was careful not to go through when I was stitching all the spokes on. The other thought I had would be remove the centre of the spokes and stitch a ‘hub’ over the top. It all depends on the quilting plans Kate has for the quilt so I shall liaise with her.

This block ended up 90% hand stitched so I have plans for a machine stitched second block as time is getting short – I have a few sewing deadlines over the next 10 days!