Piecing with a Twist!

Finally!  

As promised, here are pictures of my finished "Twister" Tree top ..... 

37" by 42-1/2"

....and its own little Mini-me!

11-1/2" by 13-1/2"

Here they are together so you can get an idea of the truly tiny size of this little Mini-me tree quilt =^..^=

What a fun way to learn how to use the Twister Tool!!!

Our Guild sponsored the class which was taught by one of my most very favorite people, Miss Starr Howell.  Here we are, all of us working like little bees....

We started with squares like this...

and then we used the Twister Tool to cut out "twisted" squares, like so...

We had to be very careful to turn them all exactly the same direction and keep them in the exact order.  Starr advised us to lay them in order on a 6x24" ruler as we cut each row, which helped considerably!  

Then we were able to just take the ruler to the sewing machine and sew the rows together without getting confused.  Easy peasy!  One note here - we had to be careful because cutting them "twisted" like this meant the edges became bias edges!  But even so, they went together pretty easy and quickly.

When I sewed all of the "twisted" squares back together, I ended up with this...

How cute is that????

Here is a closeup of the way my scrappy backgrounds came together to make it look like snowflakes ... I love it!!!

And this is the border fabric I finally chose to go with.  You can't tell these true colors on the full quilt picture.  It was a challenge to get those large elements to work, but I was happy with the result.

Of course, we only had time enough to work on our large trees in class.  But for those of us who wanted to make tiny trees too, Starr gave us excellent instructions on how to be oh-so-careful to not cut too far into the surrounding fabric.  She advised us to cut "close" to the ends and then use a pair of scissors to cut the final little bit.

When I was done cutting out all the large squares, I had this sweet little pile of squares left over......=^..^=

When I got around to cutting these down into 2-1/2" squares, I saw why it had been so important to take such care.  In some cases, I barely shaved off some threads to get the square...

Because these little squares ended up on the bias, they were a real challenge to sew together and then cut with the 1-1/2" Twister Tool.  I thought I had taken a few pictures of that, but it doesn't seem as though I did.  I actually had to block it to size before I put the borders on because it wanted to lay pretty wonky :*)  Here you can see all the seams on the back of it...

 It feels heavy and dense like a quilt even before it's quilted!  

I hope my adventures in Twisting have inspired you to grab the tool and begin playing with your own Twisty quilts!  I will leave you with some pictures of some of the other Twister quilts Miss Starr has made which she shared with us the day of class.  I really want to make these too!!! 

So go out there and GET TWISTIN' !!!

Hugs & Blessings,
Teresa
=^..^=