No Triangles Allowed

168 half-square triangle blocks, sashed on two sides only

This week saw the finish of a quilt made with the 21 squares from Island Batik's Seashore collection by Kathy Engle for Tamarinis, which were included in the November Quilty Box curated by Tammy Silvers.

All sashing was cut from my Hoffman batik stash.

The design is called Half-Square Triangle Variation, by Rita Hodge of Red Pepper Quilts, and is in The Quilters Planner 2017 by Stephanie Palmer.

For me, this is as close as it's come to working with triangles in a quilt project--something I've said I'll never do--and of course no triangles were actually cut or sewn here. Yay! And, whew!




Using the pre-cut squares, I was able to cut smaller squares that were still 1/4" larger than the pattern specifications. This only added 3 inches of width and 3-3/4 inches of length to the quilt, but I wanted it as large as possible without making the sashing any wider.

One of my favorite parts of planning the layout was arranging 1-inch paper copies of the blocks--all 168 of them, plus a dozen blocks cut from some undersea fabric in my stash, totaling the 180 blocks called for in the pattern (12 x 15 blocks)--on paper with a 1-inch grid (hand-penciled with my quilting ruler).

This arrangement didn't make the grade.

This one did.

A photo of the final arrangement was taken for piecing order reference, and printed out on a full page. That worked really well for keeping track of the blocks as they were sewn together, because I'm very visual (aren't most quilters?) and for me this works better than choosing the right block from numbered stacks. (I am guaranteed to get something out of order doing it that way.)

As the blocks were sewn together, they were checked off on the paper photo, and the white paper 'ruler' was moved down to the next row. And so on.

(I did letter each sewn row with one little piece of masking tape.)

All in all, this quilt was a quick one to piece. And there's no border...just binding.

60 by 75 inches

This is probably headed for The Center for Women and Families. I'm thinking it might be a child's quilt, for a twin bed.

Have a great weekend!

Linda

p.s. No doubt I'll wind up working with triangles at some point just because I said I woudn't. Also, after going to all the trouble of penciling a 1-inch grid with a ruler, I remembered I have a whole tablet of 1-inch grid paper. Doh! and Duh!