Tag: triangle

One thing you may not know is that finding quilting tools in India is quite difficult. I am very lucky that we have a quilt shop in town to send my quilts to as this is quite rare here. One thing that is nearly impossible to find locally is rulers and the imported ones are very expensive. When I wrote up my triangle pattern, I decided it might be worth it to try and get a triangle ruler printed here. That way people in my community could actually attempt this quilt. My husband worked in Adobe Illustrator which for triangles, was actually harder than it originally seemed. After a lot of trial and error, we came up with this one. 

One of my mistakes in this process was assuming the triangle I was using from Quilt Sense Wonder Triangles was a 60° angle. It wasn’t. It was less than 60 but not enough to be super specific in a way that people would connect to. This took a lot of trial and error because I’d already made the example quilt. 

 

Now that we have a file, we can send it off to the local vendor and get a test run. Here goes nothing!

Holiday Triangle Quilt 

 

This year I really wanted to make a red and white holiday quilt. I’d been collecting red and white Christmas fabric for a couple years and wanted to do something but didn’t know what.

 

I decided to try and make my own pattern using triangles. I’m not super good at them, especially since I don’t have a large triangle ruler to help square up the final blocks, but I’m not going to get better if I don’t try.

 

My final version isn’t perfect but I love it anyway.

 

If you want to try out this pattern you should first cut the middle triangles using a triangle ruler. Then I am not good at cutting triangle sides, so I simply cut long strips, sewed them on and then used the original middle triangle as my template. If you have a large triangle ruler then this would be even easier.

My middle triangle pieces were 1 1/2″ strips.

My outer triangle pieces were 2 1/4″ strips. You could use 2 1/2″ if you like.

 

 

Sewing triangles together can be challenging. You just need to practice. I always leave the corners on instead of using the rulers that have the ends nipped off. Those rulers are good for helping you put the triangles together but I find having the corners, helps when you put the rows together. If you need help with this, there are a lot of videos online about how to sew together triangles.  NOTE: you need to make sure the tops of the middle triangle line up on the final row or it will look wonky. 

You can make as many rows as you wish. I made 6 full triangles and 2 half triangles per row for 5 rows, for a total size of 56″x69″. 

Choosing the fabric

I have many different holiday fabrics that I’ve accumulated over the years. I sorted through and picked the red and white ones I liked and realised that I needed to add grey if I was going to have enough variety. 

 

The Triangles

I used my Omnigrid 60° pyramid ruler (6 1/2″) to cut out center pieces of both the dark- Reds/dark grey and the lights- white/light grey. I decided to alternate from darks to lights.

 

Block Placement

I placed the blocks alternating between light and dark, as well as trying to spread out the fabrics throughout the quilt. 

What do you need…

Fabric- I bought mine from many different places and was given some by my mother-in-law.

Rulers- I used a variety of rulers. I needed the Omnigrid 60° pyramid ruler (6 1/2″), but also used two different sizes of straight rulers. The shorter was Omnigrid 4×14“ and a longer one (Omnigrid 8 x 24″) to help me square up the rows.

Iron, Ironing board, Sewing Machine, rotary cutter (I prefer Olfa brand 45mm), cutting mat (I prefer Olfa Self Healing, but can’t find that in India and use something local),  Thread (I prefer Coats and Clark large spool cotton machine quilting thread but you will need an inner wooden dowel).

I don’t quilt my own tops, but if you do, you will need batting.