Framed Pinwheels Quilt Along: Week 7

It’s Week 7 of our Framed Pinwheels quilt along! This pattern is from Missouri Star Quilt Company, my favorite Missouri Star pattern. You can read a little more about that and why it’s my favorite HERE.

Videos for this Week

I’ve been making lots of videos for this quilt along: demos, advice, reveals and such. There are three videos this week.

Arrange Your Blocks
Sew Your Blocks Together
Add Your Borders

I’ve added several videos to the quilt along playlist. You can view all of the videos at any time in this playlist.

On the Schedule for this Week

For this week, we’re going to get our quilt tops together.

This is the last week of our quilt along. The quilt along technically ends with completing the quilt top, but I do have some other resources you can use to help you finish your quilt. Here are some videos you can check out.
Basting your Quilt (from the Pinwheel Popper QAL)
My Playlist with several free motion quilting tutorials
My Full Binding Tutorial Playlist – it has separate videos for each step of the binding proces

As far as quilting your quilts, walking foot quilting isn’t really my thing, so I don’t really have any videos for it, but I do have a few blog posts if you want to check those out HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Arranging your Blocks

There are definitely some software programs out there that would help you with arranging your blocks. You’d need to learn how to use them (with lots of practice and patience) and then you’d have to find some way to mock up each of your blocks. This takes some time, and you may or may not have access to an easy way to get the digital files for the fabrics you’re using (if they are even available at all). Oh, and of course, these programs are probably not going to be free. I have a few of these programs; I do know how to use them; I do have access to the digital files for the fabrics: and it’s still easier for me to just lay out my blocks and move them around until I’m pleased with the lay out. Everyone has access to good old trial and error.

Lay your blocks out on your design wall, your bed, your floor… whatever you have. I typically start out by just laying them out in whatever order they happen to be in and move them around from there. I try not to have same colors touching if possible. Depending on how many colors you have in your quilt top this may be difficult. Once I get to the point where I can’t fix anything without causing another “mistake”, it’s time to give up and decide that I love it.

Sew Your Blocks Together

The trickiest part about sewing your blocks together is getting everything to match up where you want it to. The pinwheels make this even more difficult. Getting points to both match up and stay nice and sharp can be frustrating, but the pin trick helps a lot. I go into more detail about sewing your blocks together in THIS VIDEO. Of course, you don’t have to be perfect, and that’s ok too. You are the only one who has to like your quilt!

Something I do a lot that’s a little controversial is that I twist my seams. I don’t mean an accidental twisted seam here and there, I mean I twist them a lot. I don’t start out with the intention of twisting every seam, but if I end up needing to twist them to get the seams to nest I don’t have a problem with this. I ended up doing this a lot with this partictular quilt. They’ve never caused me any problems, and I will always prioritize a nicely matched up seam over worrying over a seam that got twisted. I talk a little bit more about why I sometimes twist the seams in this YouTube Short.

Just as an example of how twisted seams haven’t cause me any trouble. Check out the picture below. This is one of my designs. It was in the Spring 2026 issue of Quilters World. There were a lot of seams needing to match up and points that I wanted to keep. So, I shamelessly twisted seams wherever I needed to to make that happen. I didn’t have any trouble with the quilting, and I’d have to look really hard to find which seams I twisted (if I could even find them at all). Now, with that said, I am not the one who will be quilting your quilt for you, so if twisted seams bother you, or if you are sending it off and your long armer says not to twist any seams, go ahead and unpick and untwist if you need to.

Add your Borders

Technically you should take multiple measurements and average them to decide what lengths to subcut your border pieces. This sounds easy enough, but I feel like it’s logistically harder than it sounds. This is probably why a lot of people (me included most of the time) don’t do this.
1) How do you measure something that long?
2) How do you get your quilt to lay flat and cooperate for said measurements?

I go into this a little more in THIS VIDEO, but I like to lay my quilt top out on the bed for measuring and use my tape measure. I feel like it stays smoothed out and cooperative this way, and the amount of time I spend crawling around on the hard floor is reduced to ZERO.

Each Week on the Blog

I’ll link to all of the other weeks near the end of each post. I will add each post here as I have them. You can also find this on the Quilt Alongs Page.

Week 1 – Gather Fabrics & Cut Pieces
Week 2 – Make Half Square Triangles
Week 3 – Trim Half Square Triangles
Week 4 – You are currently at the Week 4 post
Week 5 – Make 9-Patches
Week 6 – Cut, Rearrange, and Resew your 9-Patches
Week 7 – You are currently at the Week 7 post

Prize for this Week

Our prize for this week, from @benartex_fabrics, is this lovely layer cake. That fabric line is “Veronica’s Garden” by Kanvas. If you check out the fabric line on the Benartex Site, you might find my “Dublin Fancy” quilt pattern… This layer cake is perfect for if you want to make the “Framed Pinwheels” quilt again. It would also look great in my best selling pattern, Double Diamonds.

This one is US winners only. If an international quilt alonger is randomly selected, I will send you some of my PDF patterns so you won’t miss out on getting a prize.

To be eligible for prizes:

– You must be following me and ALL of our sponsors on Instagram and post at least one progress picture for the week on Instagram by Monday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You must tag me @snugglebugstitching and Missouri Star Quilt Company @missouriquiltco in your posts and use the #framedpinwheelsqal and #msqcshowandtell.

Here are the Instagram accounts you need to be following to be elligible for prizes:
@snugglebugstitching
@benartex_fabrics
@missouriquiltco
@cutloosepress
@thegypsyquilter

-I will announce the winner on Instagram and tag the lucky quilt alonger so that they know they’ve won. The winner will have one week to contact me to claim the prize. Any unclaimed prizes will be forfeited.