Tagged: half-square triangles
Quilt pattern: Wildwood
When I started my Sunday sketch series, I always figured I’d eventually develop one or more of the sketches into quilt patterns. But it’s much easier to post a sketch every week, trawl Instagram to see what everyone else is making, and spend ages daydreaming about quilts than it is to put yourself out there with a pattern of your own. It wasn’t until my quilty friend Alyce encouraged me to submit Sunday sketch #9 to a quilt magazine that I replaced all that thinking with some actual doing.
Fast-forward ~6 months, and the design has now been transformed into Wildwood, a quilt pattern published in issue 48 of Love Patchwork & Quilting.
I am a huge fan of Love Patchwork & Quilting‘s vibrant style, contemporary quilts and magazine design (my day job is in editing and publishing, so I care about layout and formatting!), so I’m beyond chuffed to be a part of the latest issue.
Issue 48 went on sale in the UK on 24 May, which is my dad’s birthday. He died before I started my quilt-making journey, so he never got to see any of my designs or quilts. I like to think that the timing of this issue was his way of saying that he’s celebrating with me 🙂
Sunday sketch #42
This design reminds me a little of Sunday sketch #21 : crosses, with perspective*, on a grid, but not quite filling the page. A little like cross-stitch. I like the white eight-pointed star peeking out from between the blocks in the bottom right quadrant.
There are lots of ways to make this design into a quilt… squares on point, using Y-seams (argh!), or lots of little half-square triangles (meaning each ‘X’ would be split into 16 units). But I think the best way would be to make 4 ‘double’ half-square triangles for each ‘X’ block. Make HSTs as normal (i.e. from the dark and light fabrics together, and the two intermediate fabrics together), then add 2 squares of the background fabric to diagonal corners. Sew a line across the small squares, parallel to the first HST seam, and cut off the excess. Ta da! Double HSTs.
* this reminds me of the Graceland graveyard scene in Spinal Tap.
Sunday sketch #40
Following on from last week’s theme of layered triangles with a pop of colour:
Once again, the red triangles are placed purposefully, with their sides all aligning. The pattern is symmetrical; turning it 180 degrees will end up with the same design.
The logical next step in this series of sketches was to flip the triangles, so you see their flat bases rather than their pointy heads:
I think this design would’ve been better with the red triangles in each column touching tips – without that white space in the middle. Lesson learned.
Both designs could be made using half-square triangles and rectangles; you could also save some seams in the top design by using flying geese as well.
