Julie's Quilts and Costumes: Bonus HST Pinwheels Quilt Top

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Bonus HST Pinwheels Quilt Top

Our guild's UFO challenge ended at the October meeting, and this is the last goal that was completed from my list. This is my Bonus HST Pinwheels quilt top.

Bonus HST Pinwheels quilt top

43.25" x 50.75"

This project originated from a prize I won at the guild's brown bag auction in 2022. My prize was a shoebox-sized bin, plus another container, of triangle cut-offs. They were all neatly matched up in pairs, print and background/muslin. There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of them!

I kept those bins of triangles next to my sewing machine and stitched triangles as my leaders and enders for many month. After awhile, I began joining matching triangles together into pinwheel blocks. The blocks were trimmed to 3" (2.5" finished size blocks.) Here are the first blocks to have been completed from August of 2023. I blogged about this project for the first time HERE.

After many months of sewing triangle pairs, then making them into pinwheel blocks, I finally ran out of pieces. I ended up with a total of close to 370 blocks. I sorted my pinwheel blocks into color groups, then figured out a layout that would feature rings arranged by color. The layout used 340 blocks, set 17 across and 20 high. The colors in the next photo are very different than the shot at the top of this post because this one was taken indoors.

I never figured out who donated all those triangle pieces to the guild auction, but I sure am glad that they did. It seemed a little crazy when I first started sewing those little triangles into pairs, but I'm so pleased with the final result.