Thursday, July 01, 2010

Easy Pinwheel

Did you see this crazy stuff that Dora challenged me with?  Someone decided to make a shirt, pieced interesting designes for the front, back and sleeves, then didn't finish.  Dora gave it to me to do whatever with.  I immediately thought of an easy technique for pinwheels that I recently learned and am now in the thick of cutting and sewing and cutting and sewing.



Here's my attempt to show you how to do pinwheels the easy way. You can also watch the video of where I found this technique here.


Usually pinwheels consist of light and dark triangles to make up the block. Once you've chosen those colours, cut squares out of everything. I'm using a 6" square because my large pieces of fabric were 24". I like no waste. 6" squares give you a finished block of roughly 7"



Next, match up a dark and a light square, good sides together and sew all the way around.  Trust me.


Cut the square apart into triangles like you would a sandwich.


Iron your new squares out, light side down so your seams are always pressed to the dark side.


It's easy to sew these squares together incorrectly, but if you always line them up the exact same way as I've show below, you will never sew the wrong edge.


After you've done this a bunch of times.  This is what happens.  I haven't used half of the fabric yet.  My problem is I'm running out of my heavy weight white stash.  Does anyone have any they want to donate to this MCC quilt?


Here's a much more sedate use of this pinwheel technique that I made using a 5" charm pack from RJR called "Count My Blessings".