I have always been facinated with flappy 3-D wings on quilt blocks.  They are perplexing sometimes.

How does that happen?  How do you quilt that?  What?  My finger can go in there?

They can be a lot of fun and this prairie point pinwheel is a great 3-d block to start with if you haven’t given 3-d blocks a try.

This is a pinwheel quilt block, but a little bit different from the folded pinwheel.  The points are prairie points. Simple to make.

The only thing with converting or making a 3-D quilt block is you have to watch the fabric allowance.  The 3-d blocks take almost twice as much because of the folds and 3-d areas.  Just be aware of that when starting your block.

Materials Needed:

4 squares–  2 background,  2 pinwheel

They can be any size, but need to be exactly the same size.  In this example I used 4″ squares, but you can choose your own size.

3-D Prairie Point Pinwheel Quilt Block Tutorial~

1)  Fold the square that you have chose for your pinwheel in half diagonally.  Iron

2)  Fold the triangle again and iron.

3)  Place on the right side of the background square- raw edges will meet.  If you pick the right side or the left it doesn’t matter.  However, you will need to sew all your blocks the same way or you will have them spinning in all crazy directions.

4)  Sew along the edge

5)  Repeat with the other 3 squares

6)  Lay the pinwheel quilt block out and sew together

Make sure that you have all the pinwheels going in the right direction before sewing your quilt block together.

The points of the pinwheels are totally free and not tacked down at all.  They can fold or go either direction.

When quilting this block you can either catch the tip in a stitch or two to keep them from going crazy or you can fold them up, quilt underneath and then lay them back down again.  They are kind of fun and are a challenge in any project.

Have you tried a 3-D quilt block yet?