Friday 31 May 2013

Pinwheel Quilt

This is my favourite of the quilts I have made so far.  It is made up of pinwheels and a 2.5" scrappy border around the edge.
It is made with Tanya Whelan fabric called hatbox.  I love the fabric and this style of fabric generally.  I love the colours, and I love pinwheels.  I got inspiration to make this quilt mainly from here and also here.
This image is from here and just made me want to make one like it.  I love it and the fabric here is ginger blossom by Sandi Henderson.
My colours are more muted but I don't seem to be able to get my photo colours to pop like others do.  I am working on that.
I pieced my pinwheels using 5" squares, two white and two coloured for each pinwheel.  I used a tutorial on youtube for instructions. I saw a tutorial for using two squares and sewing around all four sides to generate four pairs of half square triangles by cutting diagonally corner to corner twice.  I am glad I didn't do that as I had enough distortion the way I did it.  Doing it the other way would have lead to even more seams on the cross than I had which means it will all be more stretchy and easy to deform.
When I put the borders on I forgot the golden rule of measuring through the centre to determine the lengths of the borders.  I just sewed on enough border and found that it was a bit 'frilly' afterwards because the borders were longer than the centre of the quilt due to triangles deforming and stretching.  I took them off and resewed them on again after measuring them and it was ok.  This was just annoying as I ended up basting it twice.
I pieced the back with more hatbox fabric and the binding if a dot from the same line.  I love this quilt and it lives on our sofa and is often used on chilly evenings.  I machine quilted it with lines in a grid about 0.25" from the seams around each pinwheel.
In other news, my hexagon log cabins quilt is progressing slowly.  I sewed a lot of it together with triangles in between and I was grappling with it and it just wasn't fitting together and looked absolutely awful - most of it wasn't lining up at all.  So I ended up taking it all apart and cutting all of the hexagons and triangles to size accurately.  It isn't rocket science!  I just thought I could coax them into fitting and get it good enough, but it just ended up taking far longer and looking much much worse than I thought.  So that was a lesson learnt - make sure everything is the right shape and size first!  I have fussy cut some of the triangles and the one above is my favourite because it has a pink elephant on it.  That was right on the edge of my 'parade' fat quarter from children at play by Sarah Jane.  I couldn't have done much else with it so it has made some really nice fussy cut triangles.
Have a great weekend!

15 comments:

  1. I want to make a pinwheel quilt too. Yours is really nice.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Terry. They are very satisfying to make!

      Delete
  2. This is really nice. And the borders just "did it".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pinwheels are great! I am thinking of doing that for one of my next quilts.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Such a pretty quilt! I love your hexie log cabins too!
    Thanks for linking up :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Very lovely quilts even the one not finished yet! I love Sarah Jane fabric! Great work!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Lisa, I am determined to get stuff finished and not have too many wips.

      Delete
  6. Your pinwheel quilt is adorable and of course I love your hexie log cabins! I'm glad the blocks are working out for you now.

    Thanks for sharing.
    Freemotion by the River Linky Party Tuesday

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Connie, good to 'speak' to you. xxxx

      Delete
  7. Your pinwheel quilt is gorgeous! And I love love love your hexagon log cabin blocks.

    Thanks so much for linking up to And Sew We Craft Together x

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Amy, and thanks for your link party!

      Delete
  8. Thanks so much for sharing with Adorned From Above's Blog Hop. We always love seeing everyone's posts.
    Have a great week and here is this weeks party has started. Here is the link.
    http://www.adornedfromabove.com/2013/06/wednesdays-adorned-from-above-blog-hop_11.html
    Debi and Charly

    ReplyDelete