Pinwheels and Memories

Because I finished my WOOFA project for March (see previous post), I had a few days up my sleeve to play with the Birdhouse Quilt.

Amongst the boxes of stuff that came from my mother's sewing room, I found one containing lots of "Quick Patchwork Papers" from the old Quilter's Barn in Loch. (Quick search of my blog shows that the last Loch Quilt Hanging was 11 years ago!) I remember Mum getting me to buy some papers for her many years ago, and not knowing what I was asking for in the shop. But what I got were sheets of a thin paper printed with strange triangle shapes:

5cm half-square-triangle papers Copyright 1994

At the time I hadn't started quilting, and had no idea what half square triangles were, or what the papers were for. 

I found an obituary online for Julie Wallace who was the founder of the Quilter's Barn and designer of the papers (she died in 2014, aged 60). She apparently originally designed them for teaching patchwork to children. Now there are several different companies selling this sort of product, and I think they all are designed so that you sew continuous lines across the paper. But the Quilter's Barn papers had to be cut apart into individual squares before you used them.

I don't know what Mum was planning to do with these papers, but she had cut most of them apart. I realised they were the right size for the pinwheel borders for the Birdhouse Quilt, so I used up all of them:

Pinwheels in progress

The border takes 40 pinwheels, and there were enough papers to make 39 of them. I don't think it was the fastest way to make HSTs, but it didn't take much thought, and was easy to do while listening to an audiobook.

Here's how the Birdhouse Quilt is looking now:

I know it looks like a mess! Most of this is still just pinned roughly in place. The "posts" will eventually be behind the flowers. I will make some more flowers before I commit to the final layout. I have hand-appliqued some of the doors onto the birdhouses so far. I might just do all of the applique by hand as it will give me a take-along project for sit and sew days.

Now I need to get my April WOOFA project done quickly so that I can get back to the Birdhouse.