A Half-Quarter-Square Triangle, that is.
I’m making a baby quilt for a friend. It’s based on the Windmill block, mainly because I like making Half-Square Triangles (HSTs), and Half-Quarter-Square Triangles (HQSTs) aren’t much harder.
Now, my instructions for making the HST patches involves taking two squares, sewing them on either side of the hypotenuse, and cutting them down the middle, making two HSTs. You’re supposed to make the original squares 1″ larger than the needed finished size. My blocks are 12″, so my patches need to be 3″. So I cheerily stood there and cut out all my little 4″ squares with my handy-dandy rotary cutter. Then I started to sew them together.
The HSTs went together like bread and butter, but all my HSQTs were coming up too small. I thought about it for a moment, then had an “oh duh!” moment. The quarter sections of the HSQT should have started out at 5″, not 4″, since they have to go through the sewing-and-cutting process twice.
I’d claim diaper-brain as an excuse for not remembering that, but the Punkin’s doing pretty well with potty-training, so I guess I’ll have to plead sleep deprivation instead.
Whatever my excuse, what I should have done is what I do with all my quilt kits–make a trial square before going rotary-happy on my fabric. With very skinny seams I’ll be able to make them work, but it’s definitely argh-ivating.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Personal, Sewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.