Double Pinwheel String Quilt

I finished the double pinwheel string quilt top this week!

Writing that sentence reminds me of the scene in the movie The Jerk when Steve Martin exclaims, "The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!" Speaking of which, I could use a new phone book, seeing as I ripped out 32 pages of mine for this string quilt.


But I do feel kind of giddy that it's done. And while it would be inappropriate for me to run down the block making silly proclamations about what some would consider mundane, I am comfortable doing so here among my fellow quilters and sewers in the virtual neighborhood. I will also be participating in my first Sew & Tell Friday ~ Welcome, friends! Can't wait to see what has each one of you excited about accomplishing this week.

I wrote about beginning this quilt and the inspiration for it here. All in all, it was an enjoyable challenge to come up with a pattern based on a photo of a quilt I admired, especially since everything seemed to work out in the end. Creating the template for the inner (red) pinwheel was a bit tricky. I made no less than three different versions of it before I settled on one that was good enough and quit racking my brain. At the end of the day, it's a quilt, not a geometry quiz. Besides, that's what rotary cutters are for, right? If at first you don't succeed, trim to size!

A tutorial for this quilt, starting with "Part 1-Making the Template," goes up next week. This will be followed by "Part 2-Throw Away Part 1 and Make Another Template." Nah, just kidding about that last bit. It's easy, really. I just thought about it way too much. Hopefully, you won't have to.

Edited to add: Here are the links to the tutorial for this quilt: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. You can also click Tutorial link from the labels list on the sidebar.


The string piecing for the outer pinwheels was done on phone book yellow pages cut to 8.5 inches square and pieced on the diagonal, then cut in half on the opposite diagonal. The paper was removed later, of course. For the strings, I used 1 to 1.5 inch fabric strips, from modern to vintage and all points between. I made mine as a scrap-buster quilt, but I think it would also look nice in a specific theme, line of fabric, or color scheme for the strings. It seems very versatile.

I used a thrifted, solid blue, vintage fabric for the blocks and a red from stash, but ran out of both and had to buy additional fabric for the borders and sashing. Thankfully, Kona "Candy Blue" and "Rich Red" were an almost perfect match.

This will finish at about 80 inches square. It'll be vacationing at the longarm quilter's for a couple months, then I'll bind it when it comes home from there, all gussied up (the quilt; I don't get gussied up to do binding, though I might throw on a bit of Chap Stick).


I found a cute dotted/striped fabric for the binding. That should give it a fun bit of pop along the edge, hopefully without looking too much like the circus came to town.

Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to visit amylouwho and all the participants in Sew & Tell Friday!

Glimpses of Spring & Strings

The snow has been melting little by little every day, and the patches of bare ground are expanding. This morning, I heard a robin.

March is a fickle month in the upper Midwest. It can be 45 degrees one day and a blizzard the next. Kind of like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. Eventually, though, you get spring.

I took some time yesterday and today to work up a block for a quilt I've had my eye on for a while. It is pictured in a book called String Quilts with Style, by Bobbie Aug and Sharon Newman, and it's just that--a picture. There are no instructions for this particular quilt; it's just a gallery example of an awesome string quilt.

Personally, I think ALL string quilts are awesome. I've never met one I didn't like--a lot. I feel the same way about pinwheel quilts.

I should mention, then, that this quilt is not just a string quilt. It's a pinwheel string quilt. In fact, it's a double pinwheel string quilt!

Without written instructions and just a photo as a reference, I was left to fly by the seat of my pants. I busted out the old plastic protractor to determine the angle of the double pinwheel. Twenty degrees was about right. Then I did some futzing around with cardboard templates and basic geometry.

Thankfully, I did not have to bust out the Pythagorean theorem. Because I totally would have had to Wikipedia that.

There are more bias edges in this thing than I'm used to, so I am trying to be extra careful with sewing and pressing along those edges. I am piecing the strings on old phone book pages as a foundation, cut to 8-1/2 inches square. In case you're wondering (as I was) whether the ink on those pages transfers or smears, it does not, even with repeated pressing. The paper tears off nicely too.

Looks like I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on the inner points of the red pinwheels.

So it's off to a somewhat fiddly start, but I think it's going to be worth it.