Two small half-square triangle quilts

In my last post, I mentioned that I had embarked on a stretch of doing simple sewing, and I showed a number of samples of quilt patterns I was considering.  Thanks to those of you who wrote back with your favorites!  I decided to make Katie Pedersen's "Cross the Border" quilt. (Katie's blog, Sew Katie Did, is one I've been following for a long time, and I highly recommend it.) I followed her design closely, using a hand-dyed fabric for the background and a variety of prints, about half of them from my scrap bins and the rest clipped from yardage on hand. It's satisfying to make a quilt without having to buy any new fabric. 

"Cross the Border" pattern by Katie Pedersen, Sew Katie Did blog; my version is about 35" x 45."

A regular zig-zag is a standard quilting pattern, but I love Katie's energetic version of it, with the variation in the beginnings and ends of the lines--brilliant!  I also followed Katie's lead in using a wide variety of prints, in both color and pattern. With this many different small pieces (over 150 different fabrics), you can get away with more variety than if you're using a smaller number of different fabrics. For example, I wouldn't think of making a quilt with just the four fabrics below, but they look just fine as one of many (in the top line of the quilt).

One of the pleasures of making a scrap quilt like this is looking through one's stash of fabrics, and coming across fabric from past quilts. The green check below is from the first quilt I ever made, with Katie Ortner.

I've made several zig-zag quilts before as baby gifts, but I've always taken the easy way out and used rectangles for the units. (If you click on the photo to enlarge, and look at the solid pale green fabric, you can see how the rectangles are laid out.) 

After making Katie Pedersen's version, I don't think I'll ever go back to rectangles. Half-square triangles take more time, but I loved mixing up the fabrics in each zig-zag.

Given how much I enjoyed working with the HST (half-square triangle) blocks, and while the fabric was pulled, I decided to do a sampler quilt, showcasing a variety of patterns you can make with this simple combination of two right-angle triangles. I kept in a zig zag (upper left in photo below), but then did eight other traditional blocks. This top is about 40x40".

And my HST playtime continues. I'm now working on a more free-form design, using a palette of colors and pale neutrals chosen by a friend of mine. I'll post more once I've got something to show.

Half-Square Triangles and Flying Geese

Although I haven't posted since August of last year, I've been thinking about posting. I've even started a half-dozen posts, all still waiting to be finished or discarded. And wondered why I wasn't finishing any of them. I think it's because I've been holding back on writing publicly about a difficult piece. Nothing to do but to go ahead and write it. But to warm up, I'll write about a couple of simpler pieces I've finished in the last few months.

Simpler in the sense that there's no complex emotion behind these quilts, just a love of shape and color, and enjoyment of the design challenge of coming up with a pleasing whole.

The quilt below began about a year and a half ago when I happened to have out on the table some blue/turquoise/teal batiks from my stash. These are all leftovers from making Shelter. The fabrics looked lovely gathered together. I cut some up into half-square triangles, liked how they looked, and cut up the rest of the fabric into squares, ready to make HSTs. This fall I sewed the blocks, working up a design for a quilt for a friend.  I was thinking of having the squares all contiguous to each other, as I had done for other HST quilts, like this one, or the second and third photos in this post. But my friend suggested adding in some black. What a good idea! It really makes the turquoise glow.

After finishing this quilt, I started on a quilt using another simple, standard quilting block--flying geese. I've not used this block much, because its design (in its classic form) relies on precise piecing, necessary to get precise point. Precision piecing is not a strong point of mine, so I generally avoid it. I did make one flying geese quilt with improvisation rather than precision, which came out very well. But I was recently introduced to a specialty ruler that makes it really simple to up-size the block and then trim them accurately to size. I don't usually buy specialty rulers--just more money spent on something you can usually do with the normal quilters' rulers. But this ruler is definitely worth it! The quilt design comes straight from a pattern called "Remixed Geese," offered free by the Robert Kaufman company. I followed the pattern quite closely, changing the orientation of geese only in a few places.

I had a bin of fabrics that were "white with one other color" that I had collected for another quilt, and the leftovers

were perfect for this quilt. I paired these fabrics with solids, both commercial and hand-dyed.

I made extra blocks, to give me flexibility in placement; this gave me enough leftover blocks to make a baby quilt as well. This gave a home for a few problem blocks that didn't make the cut into the larger quilt, blocks that didn't have enough contrast between the "goose" (big triangle) and the "sky" (2 small triangles): the yellow print and solid blocks at left and bottom, and the blocks that use orange fabric with large white polka dots in upper right and lower left.

 

 

 

Half-square Triangle with Magenta & Friends--done!

I'm very happy with this finished quilt (38x44). My hand-dyed fabric, quilted with a teal Invisafil thread, a very thin polyester thread that sinks nicely into the fabric. I quilted this simply with parallel lines, following the example from SewKatieDid. I ended up putting the lines vertical instead of horizontal, because I made a back that was large horizontal stripes, and I didn't want to worry about horizontal quilting lines not matching up on the back.

For the back, I used fabric that came out poorly, with water spots, because of my not taking care with the flat-dyeing method. But hey, they look OK on the back.

The binding: I basted four different colors on the quilt, trying to decide which one to use. My husband David suggested I use all four. Good idea!

I was thinking I would give this quilt away as a baby quilt, but I think I'll keep it as a wall hanging for myself. I find the colors very appealing, as well as the combination of structure and randomness.