Tesseled Quilt Finish

FINISHED!! This quilt was so fun to make! (See the first steps here). I've seen some other folks online who have use the "Twister Tool", and actually have tutorials how to use the Twister Tool (just google "Twister Tool Tutorial"). I highly recommend this pattern.

I started with the squares in the left picture and ended with the pinwheels in the right picture. Notice that the order of colors of the squares and the pinwheels is the same in each quilt - because that is how this process works!

I was low on the lavender fabric, so I added a few pinwheels on the back, also.

I quilted through the diagonals of each patch - I like the squares the quilting makes on the back of the quilt.

This quilt is going to a baby (and Mama) who has a big sister. So I made a baby doll quilt for the big sister.

Soft. Warm. Colorful. So fun to have made these; touching the flannel and praying for the three precious girls: Baby, Big Sister, and Mama!

CathyH

Twisted Distractions: Tesselations

I love quilts that have patterns that repeat and are intertwined with one-another. . . like this jig-saw quilt I made for J & C (finished in 2007). It was really tricky. I had some help, and we had to make one row at a time, making sure the colors intertwined in the right way to create the jigsaw pattern.

Then I saw a tessellating pinwheel pattern by Karla Menaugh at Fancy Work that didn't take all the thinking. You can see her blog post here. You just put squares together, re-cut, twist the new pieces and you get intertwined pinwheels. She also tells where you can buy a cool ruler that assists you in doing this trick. You can see the ruler here.

Being a Math teacher - and loving Geometry especially, I was confident I could 'do the math' and create a way to cut out these tessellated pieces. I got out my graph paper, and drew a scale model of the quilt I would make - with 5 inch finished squares. Here is my sketch.

I superimposed the quilt on a Cartesian Plane, with the Origin in the center of one of the squares up in the left hand corner. I tried to find some whole-number (well, integer) coordinate pairs that would create a square - kind of on its side. Notice the calculations of the slopes of the sides of the cocked squares - and that the slopes are negative reciprocals of each other meaning they are perpendicular... Ok. Maybe everybody does not like Geometry.

So I started with these flannel squares.

At every corner of every square, I centered my template and cut an angled square. There is a small square in the center of each square that I had to remove (baby doll quilt material!) then I merely rotated these new squares and lined them up to make pinwheels.

I have completed two rows

and have the next two cut, positioned and ready to stitch,

This has been SO FUN!!! I kept THINKING it would work, but I waited to actually cut the first row at our Seams Like Sisters Quilting Bee today. My friends got to watch the magic happen right before their eyes.

I like to quilt.

I AM going to try to finish this project.....

CathyH