Scrap Pinwheel Lunacy

Most of my quilting time over the past few weeks has been focused on making items for the guild's Christmas market in November--placemats, wallets, zipper pouches, and a tote bag. I haven't had any projects up on the design wall to share for several weeks, but today there's something new.

Pinwheels blocks are one of my favorites to make with half-square triangles. These are just the beginning of what I hope will become an enormous collection of blocks. 

It all started almost a year ago when I won a shoebox-sized bin plus a smaller container of triangle cut-offs at our guild auction. The triangles were all neatly matched up in pairs of print and background (muslin.) It's amazing how many pairs of triangles there were in these two containers!

I've kept those bins next to my sewing machine all year, and frequently used the triangles as my leader and ender pieces. If you aren't familiar with the concept of leaders and enders, check out Bonnie Hunter's blog post HERE. She has even written two books about using them.

After several months of stitching triangle pairs together, the smaller container was full of stitched pairs, and I decided it was time to move on to the next step. I sorted the pairs by fabric, and was very surprised to see how many there were. 

The above photo shows smaller numbers of matching triangles at the bottom and larger groups at the top. In the next photo, I took one of the larger stack of matching triangles and divided them into groups of four. I discovered there were almost 40 of that same fabric.

After pressing up several of the matching groups of triangles, I needed to decide what to do with them. As I said earlier, pinwheels are a favorite of mine for HSTs. As you can see below, the triangles are not all exactly the same size. Many of the have pinked edges, like they came from jelly rolls or charm squares. It takes a little fudging the seam allowances, but I can generally get the points to line up at the center pretty well.

The final step was to trim around the outside of each block. Before trimming, the pinwheels measured about 3.5", but were not consistent. To keep the numbers easy to read on my ruler, I am trimming the blocks down to 3" square. That means they will be only 2.5" finished size!

If I had two more blocks and joined all of these pinwheels together without sashing, I would have a piece measuring only 15" square. That may be the lunacy part of this whole project.

After making the 34 pinwheels blocks, plus stitching all those pairs of triangles that have been sorted, I still have a ton more unstitched triangles in the shoebox. It doesn't look a whole lot different than when I got it a year ago. This may become the eternal pinwheel quilt, but it's a great leader and ender project.

Check out what other quilters are working on this week at Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts and at Monday Musings at Songbird Designs. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA