Going Round The Twist - Mini Tute

I was making some twister blocks recently, using both the Regular and Li’l Twister templates.  My only problem was that I wanted a nice, plain background but with multi-coloured centres, and only one of each colour combination (I like to set myself nice, difficult challenges ;o) )  The only tutes I could find out there involved making an entire patchwork top and chopping bits out, which was a little extreme, so I tried to work out the most efficient way to create my base without wasting too much fabric.  I decided to do a little trial using some leftover Gypsy Bandana fabric from last year's SHQ QAL (which I bought far too much fabric for, like at least a yard too much of each colour, so I have plenty to play with!  Green and pink happened to come to hand first, I must have put the red and yellow aside for something in a 'safe' place)

Since I wanted 2 tone twists, I realised that my centre square needed to be half of one colour and half of the other.  Now because of how this is cut out, the squares need to be a wee bit bigger than if they were going to be made the regular way, so for the large template, my measurements were like this:

Colour 1 – 6 ¼” x 12”

Colour 2 – 6 ¼” x 12”

For the solid background I realised I only needed half of the blocks above/below and to the sides of the coloured central square, and therefore at each of the corners, I’d only need a square ¼ of the size of the central square, hence my measurements were like this:

Solid – 6 ¼” x 12” x 4

Solid – 6 ¼” x 6 ¼” x 4

I then assembled these in rows to create a patchwork base to cut out of.

Positioning the ruler:

This is how it looks after the pieces have been cut out:

And the final block:

I made 4 of the Li’l Twister blocks, which I created from a grid made up as follows:

In the grid above, the long edge pieces and the coloured half pieces are 3 ¼” x 6”, the corner edge squares are 3 ¼” x 3 ¼” and the centre squares are 6” x 6”.  Sorry, I didn’t think to take photos of this bit!

Now I’m not going to claim that I had no leftover fabric due to how the blocks are cut, but it certainly conserved my waste!  I can see myself using this tool more for individual blocks like this rather than an entire quilt, simply because I’m too lazy to do a whole quilt top of these, so it’s good to know in the future what my minimum fabric requirement is.

Anyway, you may see a little bunch of these appearing as a cushion cover or something soon.  But I couldn't possibly reveal, due to the secret squirrelness of the whole thing... ;o)

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