Is there a name for a pinwheel made from quarter-circles rather than half-square triangles? It’s such a fun block!

I had a series of Irish chain-related sketches a while back, but I’m not sure why I never tried chains of quarter-circles then. They’re fun too!

I like to ensure that shapes make ‘sense’ in designs, so I tend to reuse elements in different areas. Here I’ve used the pinwheels within the flowers and at the vertices of the diagonal lines. I also used more curves in the alternating blocks to create fun flower shapes. Overall quite simple, but effective.

A more limited palette works too.

But I always like an excuse to use a few more colours (just not too many more haha!).

I haven’t been using a lot of dark backgrounds in my sketches lately, only because the images exported from Electric Quilt 8 often show thin lines between the shapes/blocks, which drives me nuts. I don’t know if the problem is EQ8 or the PDF writer I use (or something else), and I haven’t been able to fix it. But sometimes it all works out, like in the image below. Yay!

This sketch would be easy to make into a quilt, if a little repetitive. Lots and lots of quarter-circles! Plus a few rectangles and squares of background fabric. Here I’ve shown a layout of 5 × 5 blocks, so at 12″ each (where each quarter-circle finishes at 3″), that’d make a 60″ quilt. If you like your quarter-circles a little bigger (as I do), you’d just have a slightly bigger quilt.