Pinwheel Pods Quilt: A finish!

The Pinwheel Pods Quilt is finished! Well, it's actually been finished for a couple of weeks, but of course I couldn't get the timing and weather to cooperate for photos until the stars finally aligned last night. This quilt is my entry for the Modern Quilt Guild's Michael Miller challenge.

In addition to the fabrics we were given for the challenge, I added a few more prints from the Petal Pinwheels collection and some coordinating solids (Kona Coal and Snow, the Coral solid from the Mormor collection, and Moda Bella Silver, Clover, Aqua, and Amelia Apricot).

The quilt design was inspired by a block Joseé of The Charming Needle submitted for the QuiltCon Block Challenge back in 2012. The MQG did a series of blog posts back then highlighting some of their favorite blocks of those submitted for the challenge, and I pinned most of the blog posts for future inspiration. I couldn't resist Joseé's pinwheel block with a fabric collection called Petal Pinwheels. Joseé blogged about the block in this post, but she didn't create a tutorial for it, so I took her wonderful idea from the MQG post and blew it up into an entire quilt.

For the backing, I used up the rest of the challenge fabrics, plus a few extras, and mimicked the white sashing and two gray solids from the front.

I quilted it in a large spiral pattern to mimic the spinning pinwheels. The spiral is slightly asymmetrical and centered on one of the pinwheels. I quilted the lines 3" apart because I generally prefer the look of less dense quilting. I used a light gray thread that blends with the light gray solid.

I originally planned to use the Pegs a Plenty print for the binding, but after the quilt was done, I realized I didn't have enough of it to do the whole job, so I decided to add in strips of two of the solids, the coral and the apricot. I actually love how it turned out and am glad I had to make it work. I machine bound the quilt using my normal method.

   

I really love how this quilt turned out and can't wait to see the other challenge entries.