Learning Curve

I bought a triangle ruler on sale, the type that doesn’t come with any instructions.  No problem – just draw up a quilt in EQ7 and start chopping.  For a one-patch triangle quilt in EQ, there are a couple of layout options, and you plug in the width and height of the triangles.  My goal was to make a preemie quilt and a lap quilt from one of my 2-yard cuts of flannel as backing.  Starting with the preemie seemed logical. Except—I didn’t measure the ruler.  It’s not an equilateral ruler, and the quilt I drew up in EQ was, so the size was off.  No worries – it was a bit long, but still wide enough for the suggested size.  At some point I made the choice to cut the triangles a bit shorter than the full height of the ruler, which meant the leftovers, intended for the lap sized quilt, made it necessary to cut the remaining triangles the same size.   (I am getting better about writing down what I do with each quilt on paper as I go.)

Isn’t it funny how stash fabric is always different in your memory than in reality?  I thought I would be overloaded with green fabrics, but once it came down to comparing my greens to the light green check, they didn’t all play nicely together. After a bit of digging in some of the fabric bins, a nice green print with a bit of orange brought the right “pop” to the other greens.  A couple of pale scraps filled out the “light” triangles and mix it up a bit. 

One thing I discovered with this triangle ruler that I didn’t like at first was that only one of the points had the tip cut off.  I like the way that templates from EQ automatically cut the extra tips off, so it’s easy to align angles when piecing.  With only one tip cut off, I found it really easy to keep the grain in the right orientation when sewing, as the pieces were all cut with the straight of grain perpendicular to that cut-off tip.  On the preemie quilt, some of the light triangles ended up being twisted.

The preemie quilt was initially sewn like an envelope – stitched around the eges and turned, but it was so lumpy that I took out the seam and serged the edge instead with woolly nylon (after quilting along all the seam lines). The preemie quilts don’t require a batting, but the lap quilt will have batting, and I’ll quilt it on my longarm.