Quilty Progress, Late May 2026

I loved Rachel LaBour’s “Spinny” quilt when she showed it to her substack readers. She designed the block for her local fellow quilters and each made two blocks for this donation quilt. The blocks are cool centers with warm borders, or warm centers with cool borders. Rachel organized the blocks, quilted the quilt, and bound it.

While I was waiting for her to release her pattern, I tried to guess her measurements. My trial experiment below is a warm center with cool edges. It is WAY bigger than Rachel’s block, but I liked it as a table topper, so I hand quilted it and installed a border. Voila.

I made some trimming mistakes before Rachel released her pattern. I lost some of the pointy centers as I didn’t keep the 45 degree line on my ruler along the diagonal seam of each quarter block. Shhhh… Don’t tell. It’s so pretty, and I hand quilted it. Some glittery thread was involved here and there.

Once I got the pattern I decided to make all cool centers with warm edges done in solids–as I was interested in how the graphic nature of solids all in warm colors would bring out the star at the center of 4 blocks. I love it! And boy does it use up my stash bins of strips–now arranged by color families. And each individual segment sews up pretty fast–I’ve been using those as leader/ender sewing.

I will make 3 other sets of these wheels to make a quilt. I also love the warm center version… And I am already wondering where that idea will go…

All my blocks for “Flower Pop” from Sew Kind of Wonderful are done. They are resting on the design wall for a few more days as I still seem to be moving blocks. I swapped two more blocks since I took this picture, not 30 minutes ago. The right side was too dark.

The pineapple blocks are almost done–just 9 more to make. It will be 60 by 60 inches. They are the primary quilt right now, with the “Spinny” blocks as leader/enders.

I spent some time yesterday cutting squares for “Spinny,” cutting them on the diagonal, and marking the first sewing line.

Still no rain here. It is, right now, cloudy, so maybe…