Celebration Pinwheels

The May UFO is finished, and I named it "Celebration Pinwheels." I thought of calling it something like "Imperfection" or "Anomalies," but really it is about celebrating those people in life that make us uncomfortable because they are different in an irritating kind of way. I know this is hard to understand because it's just a quilt, but I decided to make pinwheels out of all my six inch squares last year, and I used them all, indiscriminately. The result is that there are a couple of pinwheels in this quilt that stand out like a sore thumb. Well there they are, they are not going away and like the irritating people in our lives, they remind us that we, too, are imperfect.

When this quilt came up as the May UFO, I was unsure what I would do to finish it. The original pinwheels were arranged on point (with the pinwheels as diamonds instead of squares), and the sides were filled out with partial pinwheels in dark neutral shades. Now that I know how to operate a longarm machine, I was able to finish a larger quilt, so I added the light neutral pinwheels around the border to make it blanket sized. I took it to the longarm rental last week and finished it in short order using a free-motion swirly pattern.

May UFO

March and April are over and I did not finish the designated UFOs. I thought about simplifying my list, but decided not to and to just keep going. Maybe I'll finish them this year. But the May UFO is coming along and I think it will be finished this month, because all I have to do is sew down the binding. (The May UFO is the first quilt in this post.)

I learned how to use a longarm machine so that I could finish many charity quilts. The first day I rented, I finished two in three hours. Next I signed up for four hours, and decided to enlarge my May UFO and quilt it on the longarm. In this picture you can see my usual free-form style but with regulated stitches.

The final step in progress. The backing fabric was a steal at the thrift shop.