Positively Pinwheels! - Project Quilting

 "Positively Pinwheels", 20" x 20", made for Project Quilting, Focus Through the Prism, Challenge 4: Pinwheel, Aug. 2015 in Yellow Springs, Ohio

This is my fourth entry in the Project Quilting "Focus Through the Prism" challenge. To play along you need to purchase a ROYGBIV hand-dyed bundle of fabric from Cherrywood Fabrics and then at the beginning of the month a traditional quilting block is selected. Participants get to chose which of the seven focus fabrics they want to emphasize for the month, but other fabrics can be added.

All quilts will be made 20" x 20" with the intention of displaying them together in the future.

August's block is "Pinwheel."

I thought that the Pinwheel block would come up during this challenge, only for some reason I thought it would be last month. I must confess that the Pinwheel block is one of my favorite blocks. I like how depending on how you look at it, it can look like it's spinning to either the right or to the left.

And if you change the arrangement of the triangle pieces, you can create several other blocks including "Broken Dishes" (left) and "Winged Square" (right) to name a few.

I wanted my design to be similar to "Monkey Tail",  "A Second Self", and "Cabin Sweet Cabin", the other quilts I've made for the Focus Through the Prism challenges.

So I pieced eight pinwheel blocks using orange as one of the colors for all the blocks and arranged them around a square of black.I used the same border fabric and couched a piece of black yarn, this time in an arrangement that represented blowing wind. Then I quilted black quilting lines that echoed the yarn at 1/4" apart.

I used a knife-edge facing to bind the quilt.

I always thought "Positively Pinwheels!" would make a great name for a book about Pinwheel blocks, but since I haven't published any patterns, it seems unlikely that I'm going to publish a book, so I used the name for this quilt.

Here are some of my past pinwheel quilts

Left to right: "Cotton Candy Pinwheels" made with hand-dyed fabric; "Picnic at Ellis Pond" with a pinwheel quilt under the picnic basket; "Polka Dot Pinwheel" fabric mosaic

 

Left to right: "Holding Hands" with sky fabric for the negative space; "Blue Pinwheel Necklace"; "Pinwheel Elephants"

More about Positively Pinwheels! and my Focus Through the Prism Series

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Click on any of the photos to see larger images.

To read more about Project Quilting's Focus Through the Prism, go here.

To see other entries for this challenge, visit the Pinwheel link up.