A Weekend Project: Playing with Pinwheels

This weekend I wanted to work on a quilt project, but was really not inspired to work on on anything I had on the table, so i looked around for a quick project. Usually, that means that I dig through my bin of Quiltsmart ZigZapps!, but this time I pulled out two Rambling Rose by Moda charms packs I'd gotten at their end og the year sale. It was just enough to do something new and small enough to finish.

I perused my quilt pins on Pinterest and decided to finally get over my (irrational) fear of triangles, so I decided to do a pinwheel table topper. I sorted through the teals, pinks, brown and tan 5-inch squares and matched them up to make pairs for the pinwheels. I paired each pink with a tan and each teal with a dark brown. I had two 5-inch squares of each fabric and matched the same fabrics together. 

I know that pinwheels are easy, but just in case you haven't made any, here is the simple method I used.

First, I flipped over one in each pair (the pink or the teal) and drew a diagonal like from top to bottom like this.

Then I pinned each marked square with its mate, right sides together, on either side of the line.

At the sewing machine, I used the line as a guide and sewed 1/4 inch on each side of the line. After each one was sewn on each side of the line I cut the pairs apart on the line, creating two half-square traingles, a little larger than 4 1/2 inches each. (Not shown.)

Afterwards, I had 4 half-square traingles of each of the fabric pairs.

I trimmed each one down to the next half-inch. Unfortunately, I was watching my little guy play in the back yard and cutting the squares in front of our big picture window and cut a few sets at 4-inches before realizing my mistake, so then I just made all of them 4-inch squares.

Once I had the sets of half-square triangles, I flipped them all sorts of ways to see what my choices were, but this time I stayed with my original plan and decided to make pinwheels. 

I sewed them together and soon had 16-pinwheels ready to be put together. 

I'll show you the finished tabletopper later. I am hoping to use it for a feature story I am writing for TEAinTEXAS' summer issue.

This was a quick and easy project. If it wasn't for our sewer line breaking, unexpected out of town family stopping by for a visit, vehicle maintenance and birthday dinner out with friends, I would have been able to finish it in one weekend!!

Until our next cup of tea,