I have had Sew Kind of Wonderful Metro Hoops on my to do list for years.  I can’t tell you how long ago I purchased the pattern and ruler!  But then too many other projects ended up taking priority and it got pushed to the back burner.

When I saw April Rosenthal‘s All Weather Friends fabric, I new that was the quilt I was making.  I used only one jelly roll for the hoops and even had enough left over to make another quilt, which I will share soon.

I was a little nervous getting started because it seemed so complicated and so many, many curves!  However, I found the instructions really well written and getting everything cut and prepped was not bad at all!  Remember the expression, measure twice, cut once?  Well, for this one, read three times, measure twice, cut once.

For the Hoops, you start by sewing strips together and then you use the rulers to cut the hoop out and assemble the blocks and quarter pieces, and trimng them up before joining them together in to one pretty hoop.  And so on.

I felt pretty accomplished when I got these four blocks done!

The instructions and the way that you sew the blocks together actually make the quilt come together pretty quickly.

Next, of course, is the quilting part. I will typically do some type of meander all over. However, with the big negative space areas inside the hoops, I felt that this quilt needed a little something more.

I first outlined each colorful hoop using my walking foot.

Next, I marked the inner circles with a water soluble marking pen. I wanted to the quilting to look a bit folkys and natural looking so using my free motion foot, I did kind of a triple petal design in every other circle and the. Filled in the gap between the petals and hoops.

I decided to do a similar petal shape in the alternating circles but in a different direction and then filled in the rest if the negative space.

I also did sone consistent diamond shapes in the white and red diamond areas.

I used the aqua plaid for the back and red dots for the binding, hand stitching the binding to the back.

I am so happy with how it turned out!

Now, I’m working on a Metro Rings pattern and added these patterns to my to do list. They all use the same ruler. So cute!

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