Stay at Home Round Robin - Pinwheels

It's the last round of the Quilting Gail's Stay at Home Round Robin, and this time it's pinwheels.

And boy, did this round ever increase the size of this quilt top, making it one of the largest quilts I've ever made at 88" x 88". It's too big to fit on my design wall, and I barely have enough floor space for a decent picture. I had to stand on my bed to take this one!

But I really like this pinwheel round, and there are elements of it I'd like to use in another quilt. I won't tell you which - you'll just have to wait till I get another quilt designed.

A little about my design process for this round. I knew I wanted it to be blue again, with small bits of red to tie back to the center block's patriotic quilt. So, I made a few pinwheels, using the same light blue fabric from the flying geese round. It's always a good design element to repeat fabrics or colors throughout a quilt to provide unity.

Now what to do? In the picture above, I have somewhat of a layout idea, and decide to make a few cream pinwheels. After pondering their placement, I added the extra blue background in different widths to make those pinwheels dance along the border.

Oh I really like that! But once again, my idea was thwarted by not having enough light blue background fabric to cover more pinwheels and sashing. Dang it!! So now what?

While pondering that question, I decided I didn't like this pinwheel border right next to the green one. The color and block transition just looked odd. Alright then, how about finishing up the blue dot fabric from those flying geese to add a transition border? And more unity of course!

Much better. The red, green, blue and cream dots in that fabric does a great job between the two borders, joining them together.

Moving on to solving the gaps between the pinwheels. With no other light blue in the stash that was a close match, I decided to sew the pinwheels together, removing the spaces between them. That left large spaces on each end of the pinwheel sets. After testing out a few more blues, I dove into my patriotic bin, and settled on a dark blue print with red, white and light blue crosses on it.

That works okay, and having spent a few hours agonizing over this pinwheel round (see all those scraps I was playing with?), I was satisfied well enough to finish it up.

Though this pinwheel round is not quite what I wanted, it still looks fine, and I'm declaring this quilt top DONE! Now to find backing that's large enough (ya, right!), and get 'er quilted. Plan on seeing the final finish March 29, when there's a SAHRR Finish linky party over at Quilting Gail's - I hope to see your project there!

Do check out all the pinwheel rounds from my fellow round robin quilting friends this week. If you're sewing along with us, share your round robin at Quilting Gail's SAHRR linky party.

• January 11:  centre blocks: Gail @ Quilting Gail
• January 18: 1st Round: Chris @ Chrisknitssews
• January 25: 2nd Round: Emily @ The Darling Dogwood
• February 1: 3rd Round: Anja @ Anja Quilts
• February 8: 4th Round: Roseanne & Sue @ Home Sewn by Us
• February 15: 5th Round: Wendy @ Pieceful Thoughts of My Quilting Life
• February 22: 6th Round: Susan @ Quilt Fabrication
• February 28: 7th Round ME!!! @ Quilting Gail 

See you again March 29. Until then,

Happy Quilting!

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