WANTED: Quilting Iron

I've been super busy this weekend quilting away on my pinwheel quilt and a special quilt to donate to a family friend who is raising money for a scholarship at Virginia Tech in her late husband's honor. It's pretty amazing how much I was actually able to do!

My pinwheel blocks are all ready to be sewn together. I have a couple more inches on the top and bottom to play with so I'm going to have to decide what to do for a boarder.

I started sewing my "rails" from a jelly roll pack and some strips cut from a couple of the batiks I had in my stash for the VT quilt. Although they looked a little off as strips, once I started sewing them together they started to look really good! I will be honest though...I did not know what I was going to make when I started sewing. I just started sewing the strips together, thought about how they looked, and decided on the fly what to do. So as I was sewing, 4 strips really looked too small. I knew I wanted to do something a bit fancier than just a split rail fence so I kept going but 5 didn't look like enough either. I sewed the 6th strip on and I finally felt like I had something beautiful and interesting. I have an 8" square ruler and used it to cut squares from my strip on an angle like so:

Cutting at an angle like this will give me the option to assemble the blocks so that they give a diamond effect like so:

I used this same technique for Mark's quilt I showed you in this post but this time I have enough strips to make enough squares to not have to worry about using the scraps from the diamonds. I will use those for another project. My blocks are 8" and will be 7.5" finished. I will do 5 blocks across and 7 blocks down and need a total of 35 blocks. I currently have 12 cut and have strips sewn together for another 32. I am saving 6 strips just in case I am not able to get what I am hoping to from the strips that are sewn together. If I don't have enough I will work in the last 6 strips so that everything still matches. Just as I was pressing the last set of strips, my iron stopped working. What a bummer! Leave me a comment if you have any suggestions for a good iron for quilting.

I hope you  had a wonderful 4th of July!

PS--these pictures were created with Tux Paint. There is no rotary cutter stamp but hopefully the scissors stamp is self explanatory.