Giant Pinwheel Quilt in Modern Patchwork

I love the way this take on a classic half square triangle star quilt has a modern quilt feel by blowing up the scale and using the dark gray solid background fabric. 

Some of you may remember this giant Pinwheel Star project I was working on last summer. It’s fun to have it finally finished! (Another WIP checked off the list!)

And this month the finished quilt + the pattern was featured in the Summer 2016 edition of Modern Patchwork. This magazine is now out of print, but you can find the finished pattern available now here in my shop. 

The fabric for this quilt is Brenda Ratliff’s Pie Making Day for RJR Fabrics. I love the vintage-inspired prints in such bright cheerful colors. These particular fabrics are now out of print, but this half square triangle pattern is a great one for using up scraps or 5″ and 10″ precuts from any collection to get the same look.

Taking the vintage-themed prints as my inspiration, I thought it would be fun to make a quilt with a traditional design and then blow it up to a large-scale variation. I think that pairing the bright colors with the charcoal gray background makes the colors pop as well as give it a modern feel. As you can probably tell, the shades of the charcoal gray fabric I used were slightly different – which didn’t become totally apparent until after I’d done most of the piecing. Oh well. I like to say that it just adds to the modern feel. 😉

To complement the traditional inspiration, I had Melissa of Sew Shabby Quilting quilt it with an all-over Baptist Fan pattern. I love the way it keeps the vintage feel, but gives all of that solid area lots of texture.

It was a fun, relatively quick quilt to pull together this half-square triangle star quilt using short-cut techniques (and an AccuQuilt Go! die cut machine) and it was really fun to see it in print. (And it’ll always make me think of Poldark since I was watching that last summer when I pieced it. Does that ever happen to any of you? You associate a project with a show you were watching while you worked on it?)

Here’s another variation of this pattern. While the magazine is now out of print, you can finished pattern, titled Sugarhouse Star available now here in my pattern shop