Finishing the Whirlpool quilt

When I left you yesterday I had finished piecing all of the blocks for the Whirlpool quilt top.….

….so now it was time to put it together.

I laid all the blocks up on the design wall and stepped back to see if I saw anything that needed to be changed…..

The fun thing about making a scrappy quilt like this is that you usually don’t have to worry about block placement!!

Once they were all lined up, I pulled out my Numbered Pins and marked the top, starting with #1 at the top left corner, adding #2, 3, and 4 to the first row, and coming back to the left (2nd row) for #5…

Obviously, these were the leftmost blocks in the 3rd and 4th rows.

When using these pins, I always point the pin to the left side of the quilt.

That way, when I pick, up two blocks to sew together, I can easily tell that I have them in the correct orientation…..

Both pins are pointed to the left and the #2 pin is on the right.

They say that confession is good for the soul so here goes…..

When I pieced the above two blocks, I sewed on the wrong side and they ended up reversed!!!

Since it really didn’t make a difference, I left it alone!!

Because of having the positions marked with pins, I was able to take ALL of the blocks off of the wall and sit down at my machine without having to jump up as often.

Very quickly, the top was together and, after a bit of decision making, the borders were added and the top was finished…..

One of the things that I wanted to accomplish with this top was to practice piecing accurately and, for the most part, I am very happy with the results

Having said that, I am not exactly sure what happened to these two…..

Since this is a charity quilt, I am not going to re-do the areas, but it was interesting to see that I could also make BIG mistakes!!!

One final thing…..

When I was using the sew-and-flip method of making the diamond blocks, I added an extra line of stitching and ended with these extra half-square-triangle blocks…..

I will EVENTUALLY trim them down to 1.5-inch blocks, but for now, I just added them to my 1.5″ drawer……

This sits by my machine, just in case I get the urge to start a “Leader/Ender” project!!

Since they have been there for several years, it doesn’t look promising!!!