Piecing the Quilt Top: Part I

My favorite part of quilting is when you can look at the small pieces you have created and see the final project in the distance. Piecing the quilt top is that moment. I’ve finally completed all the pinwheels, picked out the best ones, and now I get to put it all together as one piece. I’ve never been so completely happy to see a quilt come together, especially since I originally wanted this quilt done before my daughter got here.

Layout

This week was spring break, and though I should have caught up on other homework—I found that I had a lot of time to finish up the Evelyn’s Quilt (also known as the pinwheel quilt). After finishing the half square triangles (HSTs) and piecing together the pinwheels, its time to design the final quilt top. I did this in two phases. The first phase is to add the sashing to the pinwheel blocks.

My awesome hubby did the math, so please forgive me when I say you don’t need me to regale you on how we came up with the numbers. But, for Evelyn’s Quilt I used two charm packs. This created forty-two pinwheels, but I only needed thirty-five after factoring in the sashing and the border. Again, the math is daunting, but one day (with William’s help) I’ll update Evelyn’s Quilt into a final tutorial with all the right information.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

So, I removed the worst looking blocks to get down to the needed thirty-five. You know, the ones where I cut the squares into HSTs and the ruler slipped (Yes, the ruler slipped. I didn’t. ^_^) and the final block had two HSTs a quarter of the needed size. I call those, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then it was time to add the sashing.

The sashing is one of the most important parts of the quilt. This is because once you add the sashing to the blocks, there is no going back on your block. So, I laid out the entire quilt before sewing the sashing on. This is part one of sashing because the design may not be completely final, but the pieces with the sashing sewed on are.

Sashes

I initially tried to piece out the blocks so that each row was comprised of only light colors or only dark colors. But this quickly went awry since I removed the bad ones. There weren’t enough blocks of some. So, in the end this is the pattern I came up with.

Finally, it came down to sewing the sashing onto the block. To do this I first picked up the pinwheels and the sashes so that the sash was located on the side of the pinwheel I was going to sew it to. This meant that one pinwheel of each row had no sash on top. Then, I chain pieced the sashes onto the pinwheels. I love chain piecing! When I was done, all but seven of the pinwheels had sashes.

Chain Piecing

And now, on to part two: finishing the quilt top.

One more thing. While I was taking the pictures for the bad pinwheels, someone decided to smile up at me.