#35 Purple Pinwheels

#35: Purple Pinwheels
Finished: 9/1/12
Techniques: Pinwheels, Paper-Piecing, Tessellations, Stitch-in-the-Ditch quilting
Size: 18" x 14"

Description: I love this pinwheel design that I found in Quiltmaker magazine #140. The designer, Barbara Cline, wanted a way to construct tessellated pinwheels without having to sew Y-seams, and this is what she came up with.

M.C. Escher tessellated print

Tessellations are where you have repeated patterns or shapes fitting together without overlaps or gaps. You may be familiar with the works of M.C. Escher, very famous for his tessellated drawings. I've always liked his work and have often thought several could be worked into quilt designs.

In choosing a design, I tried to create a simple bird figure that would tessellate, but was unsuccessful. I found this pinwheel design though, and am quite happy with the results.

The neat thing about the design of this mini-quilt is that there is only one pattern piece: a very simple triangular piece which I drew and photocopied. I chose four different purples from my stash with enough variety between them so that each would stand out. There are twelve combinations of the triangle that you can create with four fabrics, and since there are six points to the pinwheels, I paper-pieced 72 of these triangle to begin with. I had to sew a few more to make the mini-quilt the size I wanted, but it went pretty quickly.

It was a little tricky to keep all the pieces straight to make the tessellations work out, and several times I thought I had sewn pieces together incorrectly but hadn't. (OK, there were a couple of times I had to use a seam ripper, but not as many times as I thought I'd have to.) Having a design wall would have helped, but since this is a mini-quilt, I managed. After that, I sewed the pieces in columns, sewed the columns together, trimmed the edges, quilted by stitching in the ditch, then put the binding on.

The creator of the pattern also had four fabrics, but used only three for the main body of pinwheels. Her fourth, a light print, she used around the edges to good effect. I chose to do an overall design with my four. You'd have to use at least three fabrics for the design to really work, but you could make it a scrappy quilt and use many more than four. But I'll bet that would prove to be a real headache though, as the number of possible combinations would rise exponentially, and you'd want to make sure the fabrics all work together well.

I would love to make a big quilt in this design, but I think I'll stick to four fabrics.