3D Quilting Session 4: 3D Pinwheel Block

So now that we've made our optical illusion 3D quilts now we can make some of the quilt blocks that are actually 3D because they have folded pieces of fabric actually coming off the surface. And we're gonna start with a pinwheel block. And if you are familiar with quilting or I've done any piecing of traditional patterns, you've probably done a pinwheel block before. But this one is a little bit different because you can see we have an actual 3D pinwheel and I'm gonna show you how to make this. And we will do one like this where we have contrasting pinwheel color to the background. Again, this is another contrasting one. And then I'm also gonna show you how to do one that is two toned. And then I'm gonna give you some tips for how to press these so that they actually are really 3D. 'Cause you can see that if I were to press these down like that, it's still kind of looks 3D but not as much as if you really sort of press those to stand up. So we're gonna start with how to assemble our 3D pinwheel block. So just like with a regular pinwheel, you're gonna start with some squares. And with a normal pinwheel block you would put your squares right sides together. You would stitch, you lay a ruler down the middle and draw your lines and you're creating your half square triangle. And you stitch here and you'd have two half square triangles. You fold that out and that would be your pinwheel block. And then you would assemble that. We are going to use the same two squares to assemble our folded 3D pinwheel block but we're gonna layer them a little bit differently. So to start, we're going to do some pressing. So you need to decide which color or which fabric or whatever you have is going to be your background and which one is gonna be your actual pinwheel. So for me, my print is my pinwheel. So I'm going to start by folding this in half right like this and I'm going to press it. And I wanna press it because I wanna make sure that it stays folded directly in half. So I'm giving that a press. And just with a traditional pinwheel block just same like this one we have four little sections of our pinwheel. So we have four blocks that are our, four squares that are background and four squares for our pinwheel. So we need to press all four of our pinwheel squares. Again, just right in half, right like that. Get that out of the way. You can make these pinwheels using any size square that you want. And you would just need eight squares, four of your background and four of your pinwheel. And they're all the same size. So once you have your four pinwheels pressed, you need to lay out your background. Make a little bit of space here. Because sometimes it can be hard to see how you need to lay them out, which way they need to be folded in order to actually create the look of the pinwheel. This is a little bit easier if you just lay everything out first so you can see where you're going. So when it comes to our folded pieces, this is a 3D block that is gonna have no raw edges. So which means we only want our folded edge to be exposed anywhere once our block is assembled. So that means our two raw edges on every one of our folded triangles needs to be somewhere along a seam line that is going to be stitched. So I can just roughly lay those out like that. And now we're gonna do some folding and some pinning. So if you can just visualize a pinwheel and know which way to start folding your triangles, that's great. I've even made a couple and I still get confused as to which way to fold them. So I like to just bring a completed block in, maybe have a picture of one or just a picture of even a drawn pinwheel so I can see which way things need to be folded. And I can do that on my laid-out sample here. Let me get some pins ready and comparing our little laid out sample here to our completed pinwheel above, I can see that the first pinwheel section needs to be folded like so. I'm gonna fold that over and I'm going to put a pin right here to hold that. So my next one, I'm just gonna move sort of in a clockwise direction here, going over, making sure those edges are lined up, needs to be folded down like this. Okay, I'm gonna put a pin in to hold it right like that. Moving down to this one, again, making sure the edges are lined up. I'm gonna fold this one over, again, folding towards the center, put pin. And then we have our last one here. Again, line up our edges. Oops just got off a little bit there. And fold this one up. So again, you can a completed block out, obviously, if this is the first block you're sewing, you don't have a completed block yet. So maybe you just go off of a picture but now that you can see how they have been folded if you're working your way around, if this one is up then this next one over here needs to be down, up, down, up, down all the way around. And that's what's gonna give us this pinwheel look and the pinwheel motion. So you would know if this one is up, you wouldn't be folding this one in because you'd have two of them pointed up together and it just wouldn't give you the pinwheel shape. So as long as you can remember up, down, up, down and go all the way around like that, you know you'll have everything folded the way it needs to be in order to stitch it. Set this one aside now and now we can actually go ahead and sew our block. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do the top two together first then the bottom two. And then I will go ahead and sew those together so I can fold this one over right sides together. And I'm gonna put some pins in it because this is a lot of layers of fabric. And that's something that you're gonna wanna think about when you are stitching through this is that it is a lot of fabric. Now if this is, you're just starting a project then a rule of thumb is to change out your needle and make sure you have a nice sharp needle at the beginning of every project. If you didn't do that and this is again, a lot of layers and you're using a dull needle, you have a chance of actually breaking your needle because there's so many layers of fabric. So this is just a good project to remember that rule of thumb and make sure you go ahead and change out that needle. Now I just have a couple of pins in place to hold that and I'm gonna go ahead and stitch it. Still gonna go ahead and use a quarter inch seam allowance just like I would making any other block. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and take this pin out 'cause I'm getting close to it. And I've used rather thick pins and I don't actually want to stitch over them. And I'll show you what I mean by that in just a second. That's why I'm removing them when I get to them, go right off the edge and take that out. So real quick, what I mean by my thick and thin pins, I'm gonna lay these down and I'm gonna tell you why. Why I might stitch over one and not necessarily another. So this is just a standard pin, what I would use if I was piecing or just any kind of fabric that's cotton or maybe a heavier fabric I would use this pin for. This is actually called a silk pin. And you can tell just by looking at it, it is a lot finer. It's really, really sharp, really thin and actually really, really flexible. So if you accidentally bend it, it's really easy to just bend it back the other direction and get a nice straight pin again. This type of pin I would feel okay stitching over. So if I had one in here and maybe even forgot about it or just didn't wanna take it out, it was really holding something in place, I would feel okay, stitching over a silk pin 'cause there's much less chance of hitting it because it is so tiny. Whereas this one is quite large, very, very sturdy. And I guarantee you if I hit it that I would break either the pin or the needle. So it probably won't be stitching over those but just something to keep in mind when you're using your pins. It is personal preference but that's just what I like to do with when it comes to stitching over pins or not. So I'm gonna go ahead and put my two lower pieces together. Just get a pin right there in the middle, hold it. Go ahead and stitch these two. Make sure everything's lined up. Again, I'll move that really big pin out of the way. And now I'm going to go ahead and press these. Now, I only have two blocks here. If you were making a bunch of these pinwheel blocks and you wanted to go ahead and do some chain piecing or put these all together and stitch them in a row, you could do that. But I only have one so I'm fine stitching them one at a time. I have a pin in here somewhere I need to take out that's not allowing me to open, here we go. So we have, our block is starting to come together and I'm gonna press it. Now with this we're talking about lots and lots of layers of fabric coming together. So when I turn these over to press them, this is something where I wanna make sure I'm pressing one of these seams one way and one the other way that way I can lock my seams together when I'm stitching them. And then also I just don't have all this together on one side because that's definitely a lot of bulk that I don't want. So I'm gonna press the bottom one to the left and press the top one to the right. And I don't know about you but I seem to only be able to pull and press in one direction. So I have to flip this one over. So it looks like I'm pressing it to the left but it's upside down so it's actually going to the right. But 'cause I'm right-handed, it just makes it easier to iron. Have my pieces and now I can put my top and bottom together, right sides together. And I'm going to put a few pins in this one as well. So here you can see what I was talking about when it comes to locking your seams and having one seam allowance press one way. And one going to the other that way I can really align these up using my fingertips to feel that those are right next to each other. I have no gap between them and I can go ahead and put a pin on either side of that. And that's going to really help hold things together like so. Go ahead and feel over here, put another one in and then I can put one all the way at my beginning and end also just because I have these little corners of my pinwheel that I wanna make sure to stay nice and lined up and they can be a little bit hard to see and get a little lost when they're sandwiched between our backing fabric. So I just like to make sure that those are still lined up and where they should be before we stitch them. Now if you don't wanna stitch over any pins at all, what you need to remember is that if you open up our little sandwich, we have these pins here that are holding our folded pinwheel sections down. So these, you can take out if you are worried about stitching over there, you think you might hit them, go ahead and take them out. Because we have everything layered and pinned in place along here. And you didn't need those ones that we initially put in. So now I can take this over and stitch this as well Thread to the back there. And even though, again, this is a lot of layers of fabrics but my machine's having no trouble at all stitching over these. I'm not having to push or pull or do anything to really get the fabric to fit under there. If you're having any problems, you can use a walking foot if you want. If that would help you go through all these layers. But really your machine, it is just cotton fabric. Your machine shouldn't have any problems stitching our fun folded pinwheel block. Make sure everything is lined up at the end. Thread off the edge and we're done. So I can take and I can open this guy up and you can see we have a really fun 3D folded pinwheel. But now we have this, you can see it's not even sitting flat on our pressing mat here because we have all these seams in the back to deal with. And again, this is a lot of bulk here but you're going to need to do some kind of pressing with them or it's just never gonna lay flat. I like to just press them all to one side. And then give them a nice press but you're gonna see what's gonna happen to my pinwheel on the front when I do that. So let me give this a press first. I'm just making sure my seamlessly flat to one side. I'll press from the front and the back. You usually do that. Making sure I'm pressing all of them, go into the middle, nice press. That's where all of our bulk is. So what I've essentially just done is flattened out my 3D folded pinwheel. So these were sticking up a little bit better and now they're really kind of laying flat. So what I like to do is come in here either with my fingers first and I'm really pressing it. I'm sort of pulling and elongating that pinwheel section and then letting it go. And that really makes it pop up. If it doesn't seem to be working that well, maybe if your iron has a steam function, a low steam function. Don't do this on really high 'cause you don't wanna burn your fingers. Put some heat on it first so the fabric is physically warm to the touch here. Then I can do that with my fingers and now you can see how it gives a nice, pull it that way, nice shape to my pinwheel. And I could go around and kind of re-bring those up a little. So if while pressing your seams flat or to one side you flattened down your entire pinwheel, just give it a little bit of steam to give it some heat and pull it open, let go and you'll see it has a nice shape to it. So that is our pinwheel. If we want just solid background color and one color for our pinwheel but we can also make a pinwheel that has a two-tone effect. So I'm gonna bring in some more fabric squares here. And this is gonna begin construction a lot similar to if you were making a standard pinwheel block. And by that it's because we are gonna create our half square or triangle squares and then use those to create our pinwheel. So I just have these right sides together. I'm gonna go ahead and put a pin in each side or just in two corners opposite each other to hold our fabric together. And then I'm gonna take my, this is again, add a quarter ruler, lay that. So I have the edges or I'm sorry, the point of the squares right there lined up with this line and I have it on both sides. And then I'm gonna draw on either side of my ruler right like this. And I'm drawing my stitching lines and go ahead and make sure I draw on both sides. So I can flip this around here, draw like that, make sure, I'm making them a little darker than I need to because I want you to be able to see them. But as long as you can see your line and you know that you're gonna stitch right along those lines that's what you need to do. So you wanna go ahead and do that four times because you need four of these, four of our two-tone blocks. Go ahead and draw those lines on there. And we're gonna go stitching on those lines we drew. And I just like to go right off the edge. I'm not even gonna clip my thread or anything. I'm just gonna pull this out, spin it around and continue right onto the other line I did. Now we can clip our threads and now we need to cut these apart. Now I already have my pressing side of my mat up so for me it's just easier to go ahead and take scissors and cut them apart. You can use your rotary cutter. You really just want to cut your two triangles part right down the middle of those stitching lines. Take out our pins and we're going to open them up and you can see that we're creating our, how you would normally make a pinwheel block. And so I had initially said, you need to do it four times. You need to have four of these pieces. So technically you do it twice because you're getting two of them from one. But so now we need to do some pressing. So I'll set this one aside and focus on just this one here. So as with a pressing seams to any direction, I again like to press towards the darker fabric but what I need to do is fold this in half. If you picture that first initial yellow, black and gray fabric that we folded in half, that's what I wanna do with this piece. But I wanna fold it to where there's dark on one side. and light on the other. So I'm folding right along where I stitched, making sure all my edges are lined up. Go ahead and turn it over. Make sure I don't see any of that dark pink peeking over the edge or anything. Give it a nice press. And now I have my folded triangle that I can then assemble onto my pinwheel block. So you would have to do that four times. So you'd have all of your blocks and then you would lay it out just like you did our other one. So you would lay them all out. And then again, you would start folding down your corners and you can see how you have light on the inside and dark on the outside. Or you can flip this over and have a two-tone pinwheel in the other direction as well. And you would construct it just as you did with this one. So you can see it's super simple to make a folded pinwheel, bring both of these back out. We have a folded pinwheel block. It has a lot of dimension. It really looks like it's coming, you know, it's coming right off the surface of your quilt. It's really fun and it's really easy to make. And it goes together just like if you're making a regular pinwheel block but it really has a little bit of extra dimension and pop to it that you wouldn't have with just a regular piece block. This is really fun to give a try. You can do it in just two colors. You can change up your colors, make your pinwheels two tones. But whichever way you do it, just have fun and make a bunch of these 3D pinwheel blocks. And put them all together into something really fun I think you'll enjoy.