Quartered Bullseye Quilt Pattern
Today we are excited to release our Quartered Bullseye Quilt as a free printable!
We have been sewing up this quilt for years but have only recently put it all together into a printable PDF.
And even though I’ve sewn up a variety of different versions of this quilt the one we are showing today is the original…the one that started it all.
And it will probably be one of my favorite quilts of all time…forever…because of the memories I have of creating it.
At the time I made this quilt I had either hand tied all my quilts or sent them out to be quilted.
But I wanted to quilt this quilt myself.
On a long arm machine.
And I knew where to find one:
At the time we had just started working with Riley Blake Designs and I had noticed in one of the rooms at their offices a beautiful long arm quilter.
So I got brave and asked if we could use it.
They didn’t really “loan” out their machine and I think they thought I was kind of crazy….but they said we could come in after hours for one night to quilt my quilt.
Did we know how to use a long arm quilter they asked.
Of course we answered!
We, as in Elizabeth and I….Elizabeth wanted to try her hand at long arm quilting too…and we, as in Elizabeth and I had never touched a long arm machine before…how hard could it be?
We used sewing machines all the time…it was pretty much the same thing…but on wheels, right?
We arrived at the offices at closing time, they unlocked the quilting room and told us goodbye.
That’s when we realized we had NO IDEA what we were doing!!!!
Like didn’t even know how to get the quilt on the machine level of no idea what we were doing.
We peeked into the hall and found an office guy still at work.
“Excuse us….do you know how to put a quilt on the machine in this room? We…ummmm…aren’t familiar with this model.”
The poor guy helped us for what seemed like forever to get the quilt loaded and then we were off!
Literally.
We drove that machine as it beeped and buzzed and lurched and then beeped some more.
We laughed and steered that needle all over this quilt.
It was SO MUCH FUN.
And our quilting was SO TERRIBLE.
Seriously terrible….there was no rhyme or reason to what we were doing.
And all that beeping….ALL THAT BEEPING…was the machine warning us we were moving it too quickly…which lead to tangles and lashing ALL OVER the back of this quilt.
But I didn’t care.
Still don’t.
We had SO MUCH FUN!!!
Hours later, in the dark, we let ourselves out of the top back door and crept down the fire escape like criminals…with a quilt in our arms. A quilt that we had quilted ourselves!!!!
Never mind that I would never dare wash it for fear they whole thing would fall apart.
Never mind the tension was off and the back was riddled with knots and extra thread.
Never mind the tucks, folds, puckers, and bulges.
We had quilted this quilt ourselves…after hours in a business office….at night…while laughing in the dark…and to me it was glorious.
From then on I was hooked.
Before long I had my own long arm machine. It wasn’t a ginormous one like the machine we used that night but a smaller version on a 5 foot frame.
And I love quilting on it.
I’ve learned a lot since then but, more often than not, every time I put a quilt on to work on I think of that first time using a long arm machine and I get the giggles all over again.
Of course, we know how to use a long arm machine! How hard could it be? 🙂
****EDIT: We have received a lot of messages concerned about this story…which is weird…but to ease concerns…the ladies who gave us permission to use the long arm quilter (that have become our dear friends) were pretty sure before hand that we didn’t know what we were doing but trusted us to figure it out…and then were told the entire ridiculous story when we finished the quilt…and we have all laughed about this night together. We love these women and the constant encouragement we, and other new quilters, have received from them over the years.
And then….To erase any lingering the fears: No long arms were damaged in the making of this quilt.
Was that more storyline than you needed about this quilt? Probably. But I can’t look at this quilt without thinking of that night…the beeping, the laughing, that poor office guy….
Ok, whew, still love that night. Good times, now…on to the pattern itself:
The Quartered Bullseye Quilt Pattern is a fun, scrappy quilt perfect for use with coordinating prints or as a scrap busting project.
Three circles of different sizes are sewn onto squares one at a time. The squares are then cut into four pieces, shuffled and rearranged with the other squares, and finally sewn back together to form a fun and funky quilt block.
Squares can be added or removed to make this lap sized quilt (56″ x 56″) as large or as small as you’d like which makes this a great customizable pattern to have in your arsenal.
This Quartered Bullseye Quilt really is a fun sew. Sure, it does take some time to cut out the circles but once they are cut it is so satisfying to sew them up…especially while listening to a book!
I consistently have one of these quilts always in progress because I just like sewing up the circles.
In the next month or so I will share more of this pattern sewn up in different fabrics but for now if you’d like to sew up one of these quilts you can find the free PDF printable HERE in our shop.
Or….you can find the original tutorial that we wrote for it almost a decade ago HERE.
Just try to ignore the thrift store plates I used as templates and us talking about ourselves in 3rd person…the tutorial was published on our site in the language that we sent it to the other site.:)
AND…if you’d like to see dozens of other tutorials and quilts that are similar just google: quarter bullseye quilt
There you will find a treasure trove of tutorials, patterns, books, and videos.
Happy Quilting!
