Block of the Whenever #3
Racing along here! The third block is called a Dutch Pinwheel. It has a lot of parts, but they’re all the same: half-square triangles. So the instructions are pretty short.
Now that I’m feeling a little more confident in my ability to sew a proper quarter-inch seam, I decided it was safe to start using some of my favourite fabrics from the layer cake.
I used the same four-at-a-time technique to make the half-square triangles as last time (mainly because the measurements fitted nicely into a 10-inch square). I think if I made this block again, I’d use a different method, because making them the four-at-a-time way means you end up with lots of bias edges, which makes it harder to sew all the parts together without anything stretching out of shape. These measurements are for that method, so if you use them, be warned it’s not the best approach.
You will need:
Print: four 4 1/2 inch squares
Solid: one 4 1/2 inch square
Background: three 4 1/2 inch squares
I won’t repeat the instructions on how to make the half-square triangles, seeing as I already did that yesterday, but you should end up with 16 of them, 12 with the background fabric on one side, and 4 with the solid.
Again, thanks to the edge being the hypotenuse of a isosceles right-angled triangle (sorry, the mathematician in me always comes out when I’m playing with shapes like this), there’s a fun √2 in the calculations, so the half-square triangles turn out a few millimetres bigger than needed. Trim them down to 2 3/4 inch squares, and lay out the block.
Sew each corner unit as a four patch, then sew those together into one big four-patch to get the finished block.
(Look! 9 1/2 inches again! It worked!!!)