Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Pinwheel Blocks for the Field of Tulips Quilt

I didn't do any quilting last week, my mind was elsewhere.  This week I decided to get back to it so I sought out various pinwheel blocks for the two sides of the Field of Tulips quilt top in progress:

Fields of Tulips


Along the way, I found this tutorial on youtube:
I've done other "disappearing" blocks before, and I love how something so easy can be turned into something else.
My attempt:
  Disappearing Pinwheel 
 Turning the 4 sides:
  Disappearing Pinwheel 
 Turning the corners, 4 different designs:
  Disappearing Pinwheel Disappearing Pinwheel 
  Disappearing Pinwheel Disappearing Pinwheel
Now... which do I do?  The blocks will have the same light blue, but different colored batiks.  The corners would have a neat design with different colors, but just one row on each side, it wouldn't be a lot of variation (kind of like a jewel box quilt design?).  But I am still leaning towards the fourth one, but I like the third one too.  I'm still not sure if this is the design I want for the outer edge though, but it was fun to try.

I guessed that the tutorial uses two 10" layer cake fabrics, and eventually that block finishes at about 12"--I couldn't find the actual written tutorial for measurements.  I was wrong.  I started with 8", my block ended up being 8.75"--probably suppose to actually be 8.5" unfinished (stretch issue).  You have to sew a seam around the outside edges of the fabrics, cut diagonally, turn to make the pinwheel, sew, and then cut in 9 equal (-ish, I find it difficult to get exact measurements) sections.  That's it.  I think the "sew around the edges" is the part where the problems can start because you will end up with stretch.  So my thought is to simply start off with a pinwheel block whichever way you normally make them and go from there.

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