How to Make a Pinwheel Quilt Block

Pinwheels are used in many, many quilts. They may be a full block or they may be part of a block. Pinwheels are basically quite easy to make. They're made with half square triangles. The challenge with pinwheels comes when you begin to put them together and you end up getting a lot of bulk in the center of your pinwheel. So what I'm going to do is show you how to reduce that bulk to the least you can have. Anytime you have eight seams meeting, that is going to be a challenge. Making a pinwheel is as simple as working with four half square triangles. And you get your pinwheel motion simply by how you arrange your half square triangles in the color. So you can see that the first step is to have them arranged and then you're going to begin to sew them together. The first step in sewing them together is to join them in pairs. So we will join these two together and these two together. And you simply join those with a quarter inch seam. When you have them joined you will have two pieces that look like this. Now very important in this process is how you're going to press your seam. So the first thing you do when you make your half square triangles is be sure you always press your seams towards the same color. So in this case, I always pressed it towards yellow. That means that when I joined the two, I'm going to do the same. I'm going to press my seam towards the yellow. And I'm going to do that on both sides. And the reason I'm going to do that is what happens then is that they are pressed in alternating directions. And that's the first important step in reducing the bulk in the center of your pinwheel. It also makes it quite easy that when you're ready to put these together those will nest into, those seams will nest into each other quite nicely. And you can just stick one pin in there and you're able to stitch these together. And that is your next step. You're going to switch the two, stitch the two halves together in a quarter inch seam. And I've done that here, as you can see, and I've done it in black thread so that you really can see where the stitching is. That's going to be important to what we're going to do. So once you have these stitch together, normally what you would do, you would want to press your seam open. But if we press this seam all in one direction, you will see that there's just a big lump right here in the center. So we're going to take several steps to get rid of that extra bulk in the middle. The first step is going to be that we want to press part of the seam in one direction and part in the other. And again, pressing them always towards the yellow fabric. And you can use either fabric. You just pick which one you want to press towards, but always the same. The very first step is to cut a notch. And so you're going to do a small clip. You're going to clip from the raw edge, just in to the seam that you did across to join the two halves. So you're going to just clip right up. Not quite you don't want to, you want to be sure you don't clip that stitching line. You might want to put a pin across so that you can't let your scissors slip but now you have clipped a small piece there. That's your first step. That's going to allow you to now press the seams in two different directions. There's one more step that you want to take before you press. And that next step is going to involve using a seam ripper, but don't freak out, very, very little that you have to unstitch. You want to unstitch the line, the seam that joins your original two sections. You want to unstitch that just to your newest stitching line. So that's just this segment right here. You're going to unstitch from the raw edge to that point. So you're simply going to go in and you're going to take that stitching out. And as you can see, that's not very much that you have to rip out. It's a very small stitch. In my case, it looks like it's just about two stitches. And you want to then turn it over and be sure that it's coming out on the other side as well. And in this case, you do want the stitching out right up to that stitching line because you're going to want to be able to work right against the stitching line. So once you have that stitching out, now you're ready to press your pinwheel open. And your first step is going to be to press this seam. And remember I said you want to press it in two directions. So you want to press towards the yellow. So you're going to press it right here. And now this one to go towards the yellow, the other side, you're going to need to press the opposite way. And it's always best if you press, if you press away from yourself so that you get a nice smooth seam on the other side. Now you notice I haven't pressed right in the center. This is the, this is the kind of fun part and a little bit tricky. You're just going to go in and you're going to work this. And because you've taken that out, you're going to work this with your fingers and you're going to be able to open it up and flatten it out. And it's a little tricky and it takes a little bit of time and experience to do. But what's going to happen is when you finish that, what you're going to end up with in that center is you're going to end up with a mini pinwheel. So you can see right here that once you have used your, you kind of use your index fingers and thumbs and you work that, and you can pick it up to do it. You're going to end up with a mini pinwheel in the center. If you run your hand over that, you will see that it's quite smooth. And once you have that, then you can press from the right side just to completely flatten it. And you will see that when you do that, you have a nice flat seam. You'll appreciate that when you get ready to do the quilting. If you take it to a long-arm person, they will thank you for not having a lot of bulk in those centers.