Pinwheel Quilt in Red, Black, and White — Finished!

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First finish of 2013! This pinwheel quilt will be sold at a fundraiser next weekend at my daughter’s school, Salesian High School. (Can you guess the school colors?) I wanted to make the quilt red, black, and white in the hope that some loyal alum would be moved to spend a lot of money on it, but at the same time I wanted it to have a light-hearted feeling that might appeal to other people too. Hence the pinwheel blocks.

I’m on something of a pinwheel jag this month. They are just so festive and cheery. We all need that in the dead of winter, don’t we?

But on to some photos. Here’s the whole quilt. It is 50″ x 70″, with a Polartec fleece backing that is perfect for the year-round cool weather in Northern California:
And here’s one corner, so you can see the blocks a little better. I made five different variations of the pinwheel block for this quilt, each one using a slightly different variation on the color theme. I did very minimal machine quilting on this quilt. First I stitched in the ditch around all the blocks, then stitched all the seam lines on the pinwheels in the ditch and simply sewed a freehand X across the solid blocks. I’m not usually a fan of really dense quilting — and not just because I’m not good enough at machine quilting to pull it off, although that would certainly be true! I just like to let the fabric and the quilt pattern speak for themselves. (Also, I’m lazy. And perennially pressed for time.)

Here’s a closeup of the binding. I like striped bindings, especially when the quilt itself pretty simple.

And finally, here’s a view of the back side. I sewed the binding on entirely by machine. A commenter on a previous post asked how that makes the quilt look on the back side, so this photo attempts to answer her question. I used a stitch on my machine that imitates a hand blanket stitch to secure the binding to the front side of the quilt. It leaves a line of stitching around the back side of the quilt, about an inch in from the border. I usually use a bobbin thread that blends in as quietly as possible on the back side of the quilt.