First set of four squares

First set of four squares

While I was poking through a fabric bin in my craft room I found yet another package of precuts I I forgotten about. These were all blues and yellows so I thought I’d play around with them since it seemed like the pack was complete and might have enough in it for a full project. Yes, I did just finish a WiP just to start 2 more.

When I first started quilting, I thought that each piece always needed to be cut out first, then sewn to the other pieces. I did not know there were shortcuts that could be used like sewing strips together then cutting them to get the smaller squares without having to sew around each individual piece. At a quilt show I attended last year, I sat in on a demonstration about using precuts.  One technique I knew I eventually wanted to try was making half-square triangles by sewing two squares together.

I knew there were 2 ways to do this, one was sewing 2 diagonal lines across the squares and cutting in between them, and the other involved sewing around the squares. My memory from a year ago was fuzzy, so I turned to Google.  Using this tutorial, I sewed the first set of 2 larger squares together, sewed the seams, made the cuts and held my breath.  And it worked!  After that, I sewed the rest of the squares in more of an assembly line fashion…sewed them all, cut them all, ironed all the seams.

I only had an hour to work on this, and I got through 8 sets of large squares yielding 32 smaller squares. I was originally thinking pinwheel for this, but looking at all the options for using these, I may play around with them for a bit.

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