tutorial from smart plate kaleidoscope quilting book and giveaway

Yesterday and this morning I finished the Dr Seuss Quilt and used a great pattern from the kaleidoscope quilting the smart way book

I LOVE this book!

 here’s the fabrics I chose (plus a white)

and this is my FAVORITE pattern from this book

I talked a little bit about it on a previous post here

don’t be scared by the charts! the beginning of the book shows you easy ways to make pinwheel blocks and this pattern has a bunch of different pinwheels, just wait and see.

I used my favorite method of making pinwheel blocks or rather HSTs but first but out all the fabrics that I needed

The main part of the pinwheels cosists of 3 1/2″ strips of WOF, which I sew together on both sides, to make a tube, then line up a square ruler with the seam (my marks were the 4 1/2″ mark) and cut out triangles

there would still be two or three stitches holding together the tip, but with you fingers you just POP them apart

see!? easy peasy

Now I followed the charts and constructed all the pinwheel blocks and other matching blocks, some of them look a little odd but it’ll all look great when they are trimmed and put together.

Now comes the WOW part, trimming these blocks

this COOL template is used, so I follow the charts again in the book and trim into a kaleidoscope block

like this! – an 8 sides shape

the template can alo be used for 4 sided kaleidoscope blocks

like these!

here’s another block where it just needed the white to be on the corner.

and this shape, a little later I sewed white triangles to the corners of these and the 8 sided shapes

again another block

and here it is all trimmed, now imagine making blocks like these with a paper template??

 forget it!

here’s all the blocks after they are trimmed

and a pile of “waste” it may seem like a lot but it’s really not and I’d much rather do this than use some odd paper template to cut these out

then I went back to sew the white triangles to the blocks that needed it

here they are all ironed. Now on to construction!

I just followed the chart again from the book and this is what the main part of the top looks like.

isn’t it neat?? and it took me one day (on and off) from start to finish.

then I added the Dr Seuss border

I usually go for darker borders, but this one is just so much fun!

I turned the strips so a different title would be right side up

Do you want to get this book and template now???

Sharon Sebrow has a website here where you can order it

her special going on right now is free shipping with the purchase of the book and the small template (the one I have) click here for that

OR if you just want the template, Sharon is having this “giveaway”

 a FREE kaleidoscope pattern (value of $8.50) to ANYONE who orders a large or small template (even without the book) if they use the promo code: bealee when ordering. (or mention my blog if they call.) Offer expires August 31, 2012.
(the template comes with one free pattern already, this is an additional pattern from the website)