Connecting Threads No-Waste Windmill

Would you like fabric with that book?

Karen Johnson interviewed me and, together with C&T Publishing, set-up a generous giveaway to celebrate my No-Waste Windmill Quilt.

I cut the above Windmill blades from stacks of  8" Connecting Thread fabric squares with a technique on mine. I don't use a template, I don't need to read the lines on a ruler. There is no wasted fabric. And it's unbiased. The edges of each block are on the straight-of-grain!  I took these two photographs of my CuttingLines™  pattern during its development. The final pattern allows for No-Waste Windmills in any size, with or without cutting through paper.

The actual fifty-eight how-to photographs for the No-Waste Windmill block are in my Rotary Cutting Revolution book. It's one of eight different block techniques.  The faster I cut my patches, the sooner I get to fondle and sew them. What's not to like about that? Alas, there is one correction to the first printing.

Freezer paper 101

Design wall alternative
With only 14 rotary strokes I can cut 64 pineapple patches to size, enough trapezoids and triangles for two Pineapple blocks from two squares of fabric. To make my Two-Color Pineapple Quilt I needed only two different fabrics, Kona Cream and Kona Tomato. All patches are interchangeable whether two colors or more are used.

Hint: I iron the patches to the shiny sides of freezer paper. They remain in place until I peel them off to sew a block. The blocks are conventionally machine pieced, not foundation pieced. The freezer paper can be reused.

Make It Simpler Scrappy Pineapple detail

Pineapples are fabric intensive. A 15" freezer paper mock-up results in a 10" finished block; that's over 60% lost to seam allowances.