Virtually 'Wheeling Along

So, where was I? Ah yes: four bottom rows removed, partial sections removed from top and sides.

It was a chewed-up looking flimsy when all the partials had been removed from the edges! I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of it.

Let the reconstruction begin!

First, the appropriate partial segments were sewn into the top edge so they paired up with their mates on the new bottom edge.

To give myself playing room, I folded under the cannibalized left side of the flimsy and put the whole thing back up on the design wall. Next, I pin-completed the partial pinwheels with their parts 'rescued' from the left side (the light-blue plaid, brown sunflowers, and tan stripe are 3 examples of the 8).

I placed the 4 liberated whole pinwheels up (liberated from the removed bottom rows), and finally sewed together the remaining partial segments (just enough to create the inside pinwheel--their 'wings' remained on the ironing board) and placed them up to see how much more I wanted to fill in. The bottom teal and pink pinwheels indicated as wide as I wanted to go with this top.

Shaping up to be a 6'x7' top

When faced with too many questions, I like to go virtual and crank up my favorite graphics-manipulation software. Once the above photo was loaded in, I started filling in the blanks by using the bright purple check to represent more whole pinwheels needed, and the red Hershey Kiss fabric to stand in for 1/2-wheels needed to finish the sides.

I hadn't forgotten about the hidden left side! Armed with this visual, I could get a good accounting of what more was needed: 5 whole pinwheels (8 segments from the same fabric) and at least 16 1/2-wheels. These could also be cut out as 8 more whole pinwheels if I wanted; I let my pieces of taupe dictate how I was to proceed.

Since I had enough 6.5" strips of the taupe to make 12 full pinwheels, that's what I did first (using seven more 6.5" swap squares and this method for creating 8 HTS segments).

Third column and soccer fabric are imposters from my current stash. The rest are from the original swap.

Then it was back to the computer for some more arranging. Just because I placed the yellow pinwheel (for example) where it was in the accounting picture didn't mean that's where I wanted it to stay. Armed with the picture of the new squares and the original top (so I could "see" the left side again), I spent several happy minutes moving virtual fabric around. It takes a lot of planning to be this spontaneous!

Although I was careful to match bottom- and top-edge pinwheels to their mates, I didn't care if the left and right edges matched up (see the soccer fabric in lower left and upper right?) They couldn't have, anyway. I would have needed two more (or fewer) rows of width to get things to align properly.

Once the pieces were up on the actual design wall, fabrics were auditioned for the remaining 4 side blanks. I decided on 2 dark fabrics for the right and 2 medium fabrics for the left, and whipped those segments up using the last strip of taupe remaining (fortunately, 3.5" wide). The top right corner was filled with the same bleh-pink segments as the lower right corner.

Now comes the easy part (especially now that the seams can be correctly oriented): sewing it all back together.