Autumn Twister

We're just on the eve of foliage season around my area. It put me in the mood to play with my orange and gold fabrics.

I chose a pattern called "Primitive Pinwheels".

It came with a small tool/ruler called the "L'il Twister".

To start, you sew squares of fabric together into a simple quilt top.  Then you align the crosshair markings on the ruler with the seams on your quilt top and re-cut to make pinwheels.  

I wish I had stopped to take pictures of my progress along the way, but I was too anxious to keep going and see what my finished quilt was going to look like.  If you want to see how it is done, here  is just one of many tutorials you can find on the web which show you more detail.

Here is the quilt top I ended up with:

The finished size of the little pinwheel blocks is one and three quarter inches. (They don't call it "l'il" for nothing! ) The resulting quilt  measures about 19" x 15".

Here is a detail shot:

And here it is quilted, and just in need of the binding to be sewn down:

 I thought that I had enough contrast just by using lights and darks, but I think that if I made another Lil Twister quilt, I would include a little more contrast in the colors as well.

Can't wait to get the binding finished and start enjoying this little bit of autumn indoors.

And they lived happily ever after

Thank you so much for the positive comments on my last post.  I’m happy to say that I brought the finished top to the quilt shop and showed it to my “boss'” and she also agreed that the "alternate"  borders actually looked better.

Here’s a photo of the quilt top hanging in the shop:


The photo does not do the fabrics justice.  Here’s a closer look at them:


I figure that I will point out the two different borders to the class, and let them decide which way they want to place them.

And now a bit of commentary:
The 17 “twister” stars are each made up of 4 units.  In the quilt construction  you end up with the 68 units you need for the stars, plus 68 mirror images that you use in the border.  Clever, right?
 
However, there is a small price to pay for all this cleverness.  You have 136 units that need to be trimmed to size before you can start assembling. 

That’s 136 of these:

that need to look like these:

and eventually leave you with this:

That’s a lot of trimming!  Faced with the pile of untrimmed blocks, I questioned the benefit of creating “oversized blocks that need to be trimmed”
versus “just cutting the correct size pieces in the first place and sewing carefully”.

I did not want to tackle all that trimming in one session, so I broke it up into several smaller ones.  I would trim about 12-15 at a time, in between doing other steps.

I also broke down into smaller steps all the blocks that needed to have a diagonal  sewing line drawn on the back.  There were 136 of those, too.

That mix and match sort of technique  (cut a few, sew a few, iron a few, trim a few, draw a few lines) is what kept me sane during making of this quilt, but it could also be a little confusing and likely contributed to my eventual error in the border.   (Also, I don’t recommend making a quilt with a deadline. )

HOWEVER…..
When it came time to actually sew all the blocks together into a quilt top, the sewing was a breeze,
I tell ya,  a BREEZE!  All the pieces fit beautifully together because all the trimming had made them a uniform size.
So I got off my high horse of thinking that piecing accurately in the first place is the better way, and decided that both methods have merit.  My high horse will still be there waiting for the next time I feel like acting superior.

To fix or not to fix…

I’m working on making a sample for the quilt shop.  It’s an awesome pattern called “Twister” by Debbie Tucker, and I will be teaching it as a class when I am done.  I’ve been rushing a bit because of a deadline, which means I’ve been piecing past my bedtime, which inevitably leads to mistakes. 

Here is an EQ6 rendering of what the quilt is supposed to look like:

 Awesome, right?

And here is what mine looks like:

Look carefully.  The mistake is in the pieced borders on the right and left side.  I should have rotated the blocks another 90 degrees before I sewed them together.  Gah!

Here is a side-by-side comparison.

 I don’t have the time to rip out all those stitches and re-do them, so I’m going to have to go ahead and display it as it is. In the one on the right, the two long pieced borders merge into the solid navy outer border.   Do you think the overall design suffers too much from my error?