Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I’ve got a fun project for you today. Take a look at this quilt behind me. Isn’t this fun? I know you’re going to be surprised when I tell you this is a disappearing pinwheel block. Isn’t that something? Just another thing to do with our disappearing pinwheel. To make this quilt what you’re going to need is one packet of ten inch squares. And we have used Count Scott by Morris Company for Free Spirit. You’re also going to need a pack of background squares to put with your ten inch squares. And we’re talking about 42 squares. And for the border you’re going to need 1 ½ yards and it makes this nice six inch border out here. So let me show you how to do this.

First you’re going to take your printed square and a solid square and you’re going to put those right sides together. And you’re going to sew all the way around the outside edge just like we do for our half square triangles. We’re then going to cut them diagonally corner to corner. Now I’ve already sewn this one. You can see that. So we’re going to cut this corner to corner diagonally just like this. And this rotating mat comes in really handy when you’re doing these kind of blocks. Alright once you get them cut you now have four half square triangles. And we are going to go and iron these open, just like this, set them and roll them back. Set and roll, set and roll. Once you get these all ironed and pressed we’re going to put them back together in a pinwheel.

So when you make a pinwheel you do light, dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark all seams to the center. That’s my little mantra. That keeps me from getting turned around too badly. I’m so angley challenged. There we go. Now you’re going to sew these together like a four patch. You’re going to sew this here and this here. And we’re going to the sewing machine and do that. Quarter of an inch right along the side. And let me get situated here. And I’m just going to match up these two seams down here where my half square triangles come together. And this one I’m going to lift it right off the table just like I had it so it means I’m going to start with my two, where my two seams are together. And sew a quarter of an inch right down the side. Now I’m going to put these together and I”m going to open them up and make sure they’re still a pinwheel. And they are so let’s lay them right on top of each other. Start here at this outer edge. Sew a quarter of an inch. I’m going to take a few little seams to anchor it. And then at this middle seam I’m going to put my finger there and hold it together. And I’m going to make one of my seams go this way and one go this way so that they, there’s less bulk in the middle. Now out here because there’s a little bit of bias in these seams you can actually make these line up out here and just give that a slight tug just to make sure they all, everything lines up really nice. Alright let’s go iron these over here. Alright, nice pretty center. And we’re going to lay it all nice. Iron that nice and flat. Now your center here is going to have some, a little bulk to it. If you want to iron that seam open you can. Mine is laying down nice and flat so I think we’re good with that. Make sure all your seams are going the direction that you want them to. And now we’re ready to cut our pinwheel block.

The disappearing pinwheel is called that because we take this one big pinwheel and then we cut it and make it into lots of other blocks. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to measure the width of our block. Mine measures 12 ¾. We’re going to divide that by three. So that equals 4 ¼. So if I’m coming in from the side I can come in 4 ¼ and cut. But because I want to cut from the middle seam I have to divide that measurement in half. So now I’m at 2 ⅛ and I’m cutting at 2 ⅛ on all four sides. So I’m going to put my ruler at 2 ⅛ and cut on all four sides very carefully. And if you’re using one of these mats you kind of have to get used to the fact that it moves a little bit. Alright here we go. And we’re just going to line this up, 2 ⅛. This is the scariest part of this. People get really scared trying to cut their fabric and honestly if you make a mistake you get a bag or a pillow or a potholder, so we’re good to go. And when you start doing this, the first time you do this you want to practice on your ugly piece of fabric. Don’t start with your favorite piece because if you make a mistake you want that to be on your ugly piece. Alright 2 ⅛ on all four sides, here we go. That’s our last one. So your block is going to look like this. And now we’re going to be able to turn it in all different ways. And do all kinds of fun things with it.

So I have another block already here cut up ready to go. And we’re going to put it together. This is the block we’re making. Now you’ll notice the pinwheel here is a little different and that’s because once we got our block together in the basket shape we swapped out the pinwheel. And I thought that just gave it more depth and color. Once you get your block together you’ll want to lay that right there so that you can use it as a pattern. So we’re going to start ours with this bottom row right here where we have one. Oh actually here let me move this right here. Let me move this out of the way. Then you can see a little better because this gets a little bigger than the board. So we’ve got our half square triangle going in and two of our bar blocks. The next row is going to be a bar block that goes the other direction and then two half square triangles. And one is going to go up like this and one is going to go down. On the third row we’ve got a bar block. We start with a bar block right here like that. And then our half square triangle goes down. And then we’re going to grab this pinwheel from our other, our other pack. And we’re going to put that over here as the flower. See that. How cute it that? So then we’re going to sew those together, three rows together just like you’d normally sew your three rows together. Make sure that your, these seams go out and these seams go in and it will all lay together nice. And then you’ll get your block. This is the block we’re shooting for right here. And you’re going to set those together.

There’s several ways to set this and let me show you how we did it. We decided to put these together so that all the pinwheels matched in the center. So let me make some room here. So it made a big giant block. And I want my colors spread out. So here. See how that goes like that. Oop, that one is not even cut yet. Here we go. Look at the four of those, how they, how they make that cool block like that. And it just looks like baskets with flowers in the middle. Isn’t that fun? So let’s take a look at this. We’ve got three of those across and three down. And again it makes a nice big quilt. Let me see what size again, 78 by 78. So a really nice big quilt. We don’t have any sashings in between them, none. And no little border. Usually I, you know if you watch my quilting, you know I generally put a little border in here. But with this piece right here I just didn’t feel like we needed one. And so then we just added our big border to the outside once we made our big blocks. So this is so fun. I hope you’ll give it a try. And we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on the Disappearing Pinwheel Basket Block from the MSQC.