Twister Quilt

Welcome back to the PeriwinkleSue Blog!  Sorry for the gap in my blog posts.  I promised I would share some projects I’ve been working on. Better late than never! I’ll share one project at a time.  Here is the first.  It’s called Twister Quilt, but I think they look like pinwheels.

I made a mini-twister quilt last spring right before my last blog.  My friend Debbi had made one in years past, and I was intrigued by the engineering of this quilt making process.  Even if you’re not a quilt maker, you may just be surprised how this thing goes together.

 

The quilt can be made in many sizes (depending on the size of the squares cut), and each size has its own ruler size to go with it.  The process is: sew together a grid of identically sized fabric squares, then take the square acrylic ruler and put the markings on the ruler on the seam lines (the lines on the ruler are at a slanted angle from the sides of the square ruler), then  you cut around the square ruler.  The pictures give better explanations than my words do, I think. Keeping them in order, you re-sew them together in the same order they were removed from the fabric grid, and it kind of looks like interlocked X’s. 

Debbi had made larger ones in the past, but the only ruler we found in her stash was the mini size.  (That’s the size I wanted to try anyway, thanks, Debbi for loaning it to me.)  So I used a tiny charm pack of squares.  (Charm pack is quilt lingo for a bundle of precut squares.)  I sewed my grid, and then made the cuts.  Enjoy the photos, as I loved watching this mysterious process unfold, and the pinwheel shapes form.

To finish this small project, I sewed concentric rectangles around the “twister” portion, each row a different color, colors that were represented in the charm pack of fabrics.  I completed it by sewing tiny beads in the center of each “pinwheel” produced by this process.  My grandson examined it and thought they were tiny heads of straight pins instead.  Viola!

Always fun to try something new. See you soon with some more of the projects I’ve finished in recent months. Look forward to a baby quilt, and two birthday quilts.