Beginner Quilting: Let's Strip and Make Half-Square Triangles

Week two of my Adventures in Quilting is underway. After so much success in the first class, I was eager to see what was next.

Turns out it was stripping...not that kind of stripping, obviously. You have a dirty mind! We are just a bunch of quilters, after all. Rather, it's piecing together long strips of fabric and then cutting them down to your square size. You didn't think we actually cut those teeny strips and sewed them together individually, did you?! Silly girl (or guy...I don't judge)!

We also learned to make half-square triangles, which take a careful and patient person to get the corners just right. I'll tell you, the people who made up those quilting rulers are genius. Have you ever noticed the diagonal lines running through them? Yep, those are for Half-Square (and Quarter-Square, too, I suppose) Triangles. The ruler did help tremendously in ensuring I didn't end up with a wonky-square triangle.

So, ready to see what I left with??

Strips (top), half-square triangle (middle), half-square triangle prep (bottom)

Ta-da! Aren't my fabrics coming together nicely? Everyone in class loves this Valorie Wells Cocoon- Butterfly cotton. It looks so cool when they are all cut up into little squares and triangles.

You can see I've still got a ton of work to do like cutting down the strips to size, making the last few half-square triangles (on the bottom), then actually placing all the pieces together into a block. But once I'm done with all my homework, I'll have what they call a Golden Gate block. It looks like this...

Golden Gate Quilting Block

Can you see the combo of the half-square triangles and the strips? I'm excited to play around with the squares a little. Your blocks can look very different just by rotating them around and flipping the backgrounds around.

See Last Week's Beginner Quilting Post where I talked about choosing fabrics.