Last night I spent most of the evening pressing my triangle units. Who would think that it would take so long to press 96 triangles?? Then I had to start trimming off the "dog-ears" from the triangle units, but I only got about half of them done last night.
Two years ago when I first started quilting, I got hooked on the Fifty-Four Forty or Fight pattern. At the time, I didn't have any templates (just two acrylic rulers for cutting against), so I made my own out of the template material you can buy at the store (its very thin plastic). It took me a few tries to get the templates right, but I got them measured and cut so that I could take all the "dog-ears" off right when I cut the blocks. Because they were made of think plastic, I couldn't actually cut against them. I had to trace each one with a fabric marker and then line up my acrylic rulers and cut. However, everything went together really easily and I didn't have to do any more cutting after the pieces were assembled.
When I started this quilt, there was no way I was going to trace 192 triangles on the fabric! So I went out and bought pre-made templates for the triangle-in-the-square. While they are really nice and work for various different sized finished squares, there's a lot of work involved in cutting the "magic angle" and then having to trim all the corners in the end. I think if I do this again, I'll end up making my own templates. While at Lowe's a few weeks ago, Rich and I walked by an area where they cut large pieces of Lexan for you. They also had smaller pieces that you could cut yourself. So I'm tempted the next time I need templates to make my own with the thin plastic, make sure they're right, and then buy a piece of Lexan and cut that to make my custom templates. I wonder if anyone else has tried making their own templates....
No comments:
Post a Comment