How to Make Fast and Easy Pinwheel Blocks
Make Them Perfectly Flat, Too!
Pinwheel blocks are used in many quilt designs, yet they can be tedious to make if you’re starting with triangles. Fortunately, there’s a much quicker way.
In the following video, Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Co., shows you how to make a pinwheel block without having to cut any triangles. This method is simple and quick to do.
Click here to watch the video at YouTube if it doesn’t play on your device.
There will be biased edges along the outside of half-square triangles. However, you can minimize the possibility of stretching by using a bit of starch.
You can easily adapt Jenny’s method to any size pinwheel block using the chart or formula below. Just determine what size the half-square triangle blocks that make up the pinwheel need to be.
Chart from OPquilt.com.
One thing Jenny’s method does not address is the bulk that is created in the center of pinwheel blocks. To make perfectly flat pinwheels take a look at the method provided by Rachel Rossi.
Rachel uses a different method to create her half-square triangles, which is nearly as quick as Jenny’s. Choose whichever method works best for you, then take a look at how Rachel stitches them together to make a pinwheel block – and then how she presses the seams. This is an excellent way to minimize bulk in the middle of a pinwheel block.
Image Source: The pretty baby quilt top shown at the top of the page is from Sew Lovely.
