WIP Wednesday- Wonky Pinwheels

On Monday I posted about the wonky pinwheel blocks that we were asked to make for our February Queen Bee over in the We Bee Learning Flickr bee.  I had so much fun making them that I decided to stay on that theme and make a mini-quilt using the same pattern.  Since I already had my aqua, blue, green, grey, and yellow scraps out I decided to stick with the same color palette too.

I started by cutting 62 - 2.5" foundation blocks with the intention of making one larger mini-quilt finishing at approximately 16" square.  But I got to piecing and realized that I didn't care for the large, square design.  So I decided to go with a 4x8 block layout.  The problem with this is that I had a bunch of half pinwheels along the edges and didn't really care of that either.  So I cut and pieced another 56 half pinwheel blocks to complete the edges.  You can see them in the picture below.  I'm so much happier with this layout.  It makes the quilt feel more complete to me.  This brings the approx. finished size to 12" x 20".

Once I had my tops pieced I had two roughly identical mini-quilts so to help make them stand on their own I decided to hand quilt one (in a fit of insanity, most likely) and machine quilt the other.  These pictures are obviously the hand quilted one.

I've never done ANY hand quilting before so this is really more of an experiment than anything else.  I had some nice light aqua cotton thread that I started quilting it with but I really wasn't happy with how it looked.  The stitches didn't stand out like I wanted them to...so I picked them out and went to the store to pick up some Pearl Cotton the next day.  I decided on some light green and aqua pearl cotton #5 and I'm much happier with how it looks.

I'm simply following the lines of the pinwheels in either green or aqua, using a random placement of each color.  And yes, my stitches aren't perfect, but I feel like this is a good introduction to hand quilting and I'm really happy with how they look!  I think that next time I'd invest in a good hand quilting hoop for this.  I'm just using an embroidery hoop that I had on hand and it stretched the quilt a little too tight to make the quilting easy.

Tonight is our monthly quilt guild meeting and I'm excited to show off the incomplete quilt at show and tell!  Maybe I'll get some hand quilting tips too!  Once I have pictures of the other version I'll share that here too.   I'm linking up with this weeks WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced.

Happy (Hand) Quilting!