How I Make Bonus Half-Square Triangles

While working on the May Stash Artists cover quilt (to be revealed soon!), I made a lot of stitch-and-flip flying geese. Whenever I make stitch-and-flip flying geese, I also make bonus half-square triangles (HSTs), because I hate wasting those corner pieces and I know that if I don't sew them together in the moment, they'll never get done. Aren't they pretty?

After they were all done, I realized I should have taken pictures so I could share how I make my bonus HSTs, but thankfully my current leaders and enders project is also stitch-and-flip flying geese, so I stitched up one of them for pictures instead.

I have to start by acknowledging that I learned this method on Bonnie Hunter's blog years ago, so she's the genius behind what I'm about to share. This method results in bonus HSTs in sizes to fit with the other common size units we make, making them much more useable.

How big will the bonus HST be?

The size of your bonus HST is determined by the cut size of the squares for your flying geese. The unfinished size of the bonus HST will be 1" smaller than the square.

For this tutorial, I'm using 2 ½" squares. That means the largest bonus HST I can make is 1 ½" unfinished (1" finished). The flying geese I made for the May Stash Artists pattern used 3 ½" squares, so I could make 2 ½" unfinished (2" finished) HSTs with them. 

What you need

• your rectangle and squares cut to the sizes needed for your stitch-and-flip flying geese
• a piece of template plastic, cardboard, or paper
• a ruler
• a sharp pencil or a pen
• scissors for cutting the plastic or cardboard
• pins
• rotary cutter

Make your template

I've made my templates for the bonus HSTs a couple of different ways, so I'll share both here. First is the method Bonnie Hunter calls a 'triangle buddy.' If you have template plastic, or any plastic thin enough to cut neatly with scissors, that's the best thing to use. If you don't have a suitable piece of plastic, a piece of cardboard from a cereal box or something similar will also work, but it will need to be replaced more often as the edge softens with use, making it less accurate.

To make your triangle buddy, draw a square the same size your unfinished bonus HST will be. Remember, that's 1" smaller than the cut square for your flying geese. For this tutorial, I'm making 1 ½" unfinished bonus HSTs, so I draw a 1 ½" square. I don't have any template plastic at the moment, so I used cardboard from a cracker box.

Now draw a diagonal line from corner to corner.

Cut out the square, then cut it in half along the diagonal line. You now have two triangle buddies. I usually write 'triangle buddy' on them so I don't throw them out, thinking they're just random bits of cardboard.

The other way I've made a template was to draw a square on a piece of paper the same size as the square for the flying geese. So for this tutorial, that is a 2 ½" square.

Along the top of the square, measure 1 ½" (or the unfinished size of your bonus HST) from the right corner and make a mark. Along the right side of the square, measure 1 ½" (or the unfinished size of your bonus HST) down from the top corner and make a mark. Use a ruler to draw a line connecting the marks, extending the line past the square.

Draw the lines on the squares

Now we're ready to draw the lines on the back of the squares. First, draw the diagonal line from corner to corner. This is the standard line for the stitch-and-flip flying geese.

Next, draw the line for the bonus HST. If you're using a triangle buddy, place it in the corner, lining up the edges of the template with the edges of the square. 

Draw a line along the diagonal edge of the template.

If you're using the square drawn on paper, place your fabric square on top of the template, lining up the edges exactly.

Line up your ruler with the diagonal line and draw the line.

Make the flying geese and bonus HST

Just as you normally do for stitch-and-flip flying geese, align a square with one end of the rectangle, with the drawn line as shown. Make sure the second line drawn for the bonus HST is towards the corner. Pin the square in place.

Stitch directly on both lines. Normally I chain piece these, stitching one line on all the units I'm making and then stitching the second line on all of them.

Cut ¼" away from the seam for the flying geese.

Now trim the seam allowance on the bonus HST to ¼" as well.

Press both units open.

Repeat with a second square on the other end of the rectangle to give you a finished flying geese unit and two bonus HSTs. Trim the dog ears off the bonus HSTs.

That's it! Now you're ready to make bonus HSTs whenever you make stitch-and-flip units like flying geese or snowball corners. 

I've been pondering how to use this batch of HSTs and I think they might show up in a future Stash Artists mini quilt pattern. If you love scrappy and stash-friendly quilt patterns and want sew with virtual friends, come join us in Stash Artists!

My First Quilt with Hillary Cooper

It's the last Friday of April, which means it's time for another My First Quilt interview! This month Hillary Cooper shares the story of her first quilt.

Hillary is a quilt pattern writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. She's a lifelong maker and serial crafter whose modern patterns often reinvent traditional blocks through colour and improv piecing.

You can connect with Hillary at her website and on Instagram.

And now, here is Hillary's first quilt!

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

I made my first very basic quilt in 1997 when I moved to Vancouver and was looking for ways to fill my time while my husband was at work. We had just moved across the country from Toronto and I had no friends or family nearby. I hoped starting a new hobby would help me to find community. That year I fell in love with quilting and followed up that first quilt with a quilt sampler class that I finished and gave to my sister as a wedding gift when she was married in 1998. 

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

The first quilt was a basic 5" square block where we alternated colours in a checkerboard format and then tied the quilt at each intersection. Great quilt for practicing a 1/4" seam and many people were gifted one that year for their new babies.  

The sampler that I made tried many different techniques including traditional piecing, using templates and applique. I cut all my pieces with scissors. I'm pretty sure I didn't have a rotary cutter back then. The wedding quilt was quilted by a longarmer (must have been among some of the first) in order to make sure it would be ready for the wedding.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

I took classes at my local quilt shop called The Cloth Shop. Back then they were located in a beautiful brick and mortar on 10th Avenue. They serviced machines in the back and had classes in the basement. I actually recently found the pattern instructions from that very first quilt and the instructor had given us her home phone number!

The book Hillary used for her first sampler quilt

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

The very first quilt was light pink and blue which are often what I use today but the quilt for my sister which was my first "real" quilt was very much a quilt of the 90s using browns, forest green, maroon, and navy. That is not really my colour palette today. 

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

I actually did a rent to own with the first sewing machine because I knew I didn't always stick with all the crafts I liked to try. However, I was an actress back then and I loved how making a quilt allowed me to be creative but had a beginning, middle and end. The issue with acting is that most of what you do is audition and that can be frustrating and demoralizing to never get to see the work progress. I loved quilting and loved that everyone was excited to receive a piece of my work. I became obsessed and quickly moved from learning to experimenting and doing my own thing with the fabric. At the beginning that meant creating picture stories with applique. I have an early one where I found a panel and then paired it with Sunbonnet Sue and Sam as a baby quilt. That recipient is now 27 and still travels with the rag that it has become everywhere.

This early quilt of Hillary's has been well loved!

Where is the quilt now?

The very first quilt with the squares, I have no idea. I don't even remember who I gave it to. Probably a cousin. The wedding quilt is in my sister's cupboard (see my eye roll here). And the Sunbonnet Sue as I said is with my friend's daughter and I have seen it and I'm pretty sure that calling it a quilt now would be generous.

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Enjoy the process. This is something that is going to bring you so much joy later in life.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

If we are talking about the squares I think I might go back and make some more because it's such a great way to use scraps and play with colour. With the wedding quilt, I'm so glad that was the first major quilt I tried because it covered so many different techniques and helped me hone skills that would give me confidence.

Thank you, Hillary for sharing the story of your first quilt(s)!

Portrait of a Flower Mini Quilt and TGIFF

Welcome to another TGIFF party, where we celebrate our finishes!

This year for Stash Artists members, I'm creating a new mini quilt pattern every month. I'm having so much fun with it! I have so many quilt ideas I want to make, so this keeps me playing with something new every month. If you're not a Stash Artists member yet, you can join us and get in on the mini quilt fun, too!

The April Mini of the Month is Portrait of a Flower. It's a fun mix of piecing and appliqué, with a big, bold flower taking center stage.

It was also ridiculously hard to get a good picture of it 😆 No matter what I tried, the colours look more flat than they are in real life. I bought myself a bouquet of flowers to use as a photo prop, hoping they'd make for more interesting pictures.

Even with a special daylight light and some editing, the colours weren't quite right. The flowers sure are pretty, though!

I've always loved appliqué quilts. My very first quilt was an appliqué quilt and I rarely go long without doing at least a little bit of appliqué. Like most I've done, this is fusible, raw-edge appliqué. I keep telling myself I'm going to learn needle-turn appliqué, but haven't tried it yet, probably because I keep doing EPP as my hand stitching project and there are only so many hours in the day!

I chose to only stitch around the flower pieces with the quilting, and I used my free motion foot to go around each shape three times close to the edge with matching Aurifil 50 wt thread (1135 for the yellow and 4225 for the purple). For the flower center, I also quilted a spiral from the edge into the middle of the circle. For the flower petals, I only quilted at the edges, leaving the petals to puff up a little.

For custom quilting like this, I'm usually making it up as I go along. I rarely know what I'll do in all the various parts before I start. So once the flower was finished, I looked at it for a while before deciding to do a dense loopy meander in the background around the flower. I then decided to do a tiny spiral meander in the purple. I didn't realize before I started how similar it would look to the loopy meander around the flower, especially since they're both pretty much the same scale, and by the time I noticed I had quilted enough of it that I wasn't interested in ripping it all out. I'm calling it a lesson learned, not a mistake!

The back and forth lines in the white sashing break up the sameness of the quilting nicely. The yellow cornerstones have the same back and forth lines, but on a diagonal.

I love, love, love how the quilting looks on the back!

The flowers do make a nice prop 😊

For the binding, I really wanted to use the same dark purple I used for the flower petals, but didn't have enough. Purple is one of those colours that can be hard to match, since it can have either blue or pink tones, and I didn't have enough of any other dark purple that had the right tone to match the flower. I did have two that were similar enough that I thought I could get away with using them both, which would give me enough for the binding. It's really hard to tell it's not the same fabric all the way around the quilt!

When I was decorating for Christmas, I was looking for a place to hang my Let It Snow mini and ended up using really strong magnets to hang it on the fridge. Since it wasn't Christmas-specific, I left it up until almost the end of March, but then it felt like it was time to take down the snowman (even though we still have a lot of snow!). The fridge felt really bare, though, so I tried Portrait of a Flower and was thrilled to see it fit perfectly. The magnets are from the innards of a computer and their odd shape looks kind of like a frame on the corners of the quilt. I think I'll always have a quilt on the fridge now!

That's one of our wedding pictures above the quilt

That's my most recent finish. What's yours? Link it up below, then be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

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