Layered Fusing Tutorial

A couple of days ago, blog reader Ursula posed the following question:

Q: Do you fuse all the circles on top of each? Are there about 5-6 layers on each square?

Isn't that great? Ursula is just the one for asking pertinent questions. So, I took some step-by-step pictures yesterday and have this tutorial:


Here is the first circle in my block.



And here is the fabric I want to fuse it to.




This surprising tool is a small sliver of bar soap that is left over after the bar is almost all used up. You know the stage: you can't use it anymore because it just breaks. That piece of soap, dried out, is an excellent marking tool.



It's a little hard to take a picture of something that usually takes two hands, but I use the soap to trace under the top piece so that I know where to cut out the bottom piece. I don't trace right at the edge, tho. The soap line would show. I trace a little in from the edge.




Now I have my circle traced onto my fabric.



And I cut that part out.



Then I can fuse the two together.



But in all but the overlap, it is essentially just one layer.



Then I continue on, building up the layers, removing the backs, until I get something like this:



But the back looks like this:




The reasons for doing it this way are
1: to save fabric. Those cut out pieces are being immediately recycled into the next block or blocks in this quilt. And,
2: to reduce bulk. The fusing becomes a little less reliable when there are so many layers sandwiched together, the quilt is heavier and harder to quilt.

And here is the current status:




BTW, all of these pictures were taken with my new camera. Woohoo!