2 Easy Ways to Make Basic Half Square Triangles | Easy Quilt Block Tutorial

hi everyone it's me Darlene I am starting a new quilt block series specifically for half square triangles in case you don't know what a half square triangle is it's a block that ends up looking like this one triangle of one color another triangle of another color although I'm going to be teaching you how to do way more with half square triangles than this I'm sure most of you know how to do this trick with half square triangles to make them the easy way but some of you probably don't know and I might be referring back to this video so I thought I would give it a video all by itself quick and easy back in the olden days people used to actually cut squares into triangles and then match them up and sew them together this way is much much easier this is such a versatile block you are going to be using it many times in the quilting projects that I have for you guys coming up so what you're going to do is take two squares of the same size pretty much any size I happen to be using 8 inch squares you are going to put them right sides together get yourself a ruler I have my handy-dandy ruler with my shower bar suction cup thingy and you're just going to put it corner to corner again as best as you can it's going to draw a line with anything a pen a pencil the line does not matter because we will be cutting on that line obviously if you have a dark side and a light side you want to be writing on the light side now I'm going to the Machine and I am going to stitch on each side of the line I'm going to have my little foot against the line that's going to keep me on the straight and narrow I will take you to the sewing machine and show you what I mean I don't know if you can see the line I do believe you can I like to sew with the line to the right side of the foot facing me on the right side that's just the way I like to do it you can do it this way if you prefer and have the line on the left side of your foot I'm just going to sew and I'm going to keep the line to the edge of my foot and I wobbled a little bit and that's okay just a little bit tiny tiny little bit I don't think it would be even showing okay I'm going to go to the other side and do the same thing some people might say oh I didn't stay straight it really isn't going to matter I promise you it's all okay I think this setting is better my daylight is funky today now that they did that all going to do is cut on that line you can use your scissors if you like I happen to have my rotary cutter in my rule already so I'm going to just use my rotary cutter I'm just going to cut on the line and now we're going to go and press these open the rule of thumb is the press to the dark side if you have a dark side obviously this side of darker than this side there's absolutely no reason to open this and press it open just a complete waste of time so just do it to the side and even if both sides are light fabric you can still just do it to the side now you end up with two half square triangle blocks and all you're going to have to do is trim the little points at the corner and you are done I started with eight inch squares and this is measuring a little bit more than seven and a half finished but what you can do especially if you don't want to be meticulous about cutting your original blocks let's say you want an 8 inch finished block cut your squares 9 inches cut them rough don't worry about it make your half square triangles and then when you have it opened up you can take whatever ruler you want and trim it to the size you want it's good to have a ruler that has a diagonal line so you can put your diagonal line on the diagonal line here and then you know you're cutting it evenly but now if you make a bunch of these you can put them together any way you want you can make a pattern like this or you could make a pattern like this and you know think in terms of four you can make a big block if you had two more like this face down you'd have like a big diamond you can make them this way you can let's see just I'm trying to think there's just all kinds of different ways you can end up making a pinwheel this way so I just wanted to show you how to make them we'll deal with what we can use them for later and I will be showing you how to funkify these in very simple ways by just doing a few more steps so fun so cool make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of that okay let's do this one more time but we're going to do four little half square triangles this time put your two blocks right sides together we don't need to draw any lines this time we're just going to go and sew around the entire block with about a quarter of an inch seam allowance again just use your foot as your guide you'll notice I don't pin my fabric this is not slippery it's not like going to slide all over the place but do use pins if that makes you happy I don't like pins it takes extra time and I tend to injure myself so here we go we're just going to put the foot down I'm going to keep my foot at the edge and with sewing all the way around when you get to the corner you can stop and put the needle in and pivot or you can go right off the edge I'll show you going right off the edge hey and you would just take your fabric I think that's a little bit more time-consuming get the thread out of the way and then start again this time I'm going to pivot so I'm just going to go to where I think is the right spot which yeah I'd say right there I'm going to turn perfect I'm right on the edge now it's time to cut it is always good to set your seams that means to just press it flat which I just did it relaxes the thread that you just used to stitch this together and it makes it much easier to open and to press so now this time we are going to cut across diagonally in both directions so we're going to go diagonally this way I'm just matching up corner to corner and then we're going to do the same if you have a board you can just turn it the same going in this direction it goes apart I'm going to open them and we're going to have four half-square triangles super sweet isn't it now one way to press without turning my camera around is you can just go to the ironing board you want to press to the dark side so you put your dark side on top I've already set this I'm going to just flip it over and take my iron and press in that direction easy is that going to trim and trim let me finish the others and I'll show you what we can do I started out with eight inch squares and my little blocks are approximately five inches square isn't that cute do love you know if you just want to zippity-doo-dah right through this you wouldn't even have to trim those little points you'll see others showing you that you have to make sure this is perfectly square and trim it all up you know you can if you want I personally had necessary you don't have to have finished quilting products that are so perfect that you're able to you know look at them with a magnifying glass and not see a mistake that's not what we're about if you're making a quilt you want it to be snuggled and cuddled and warm that's what you want little crooked things don't matter okay so here's up different things you can do if you make yourself a bunch of these it said you can do it like this or you can you know turn and make arrows pointing that way you could also make the arrows pointing the other way you can make your diamonds that we mentioned isn't that cool we could also make the white part the diamond SuperDuper cool and so on just play with it have fun with it I am so excited to be back to doing quilt blocks do subscribe because I'm going to show you different ways that we can put these blocks together to make a quilt I won't be making entire quilts because I don't have that much time but I will show you how you can make cool blocks like here right here you can do a sashing between these blocks and have them separated just so much that we can do and I'm also going to show you how to just make these particular blocks a little bit funkified thank you so much for watching and I'll be back with more soon bye you

Channel: Darlene Michaud

Views: 136,064

Rating: 4.9231453 out of 5

Keywords: Darlene Michaud, DarleneMichaud.com, Sanford Maine, Sanford ME, quilt block party, quilting tutorial, quilt as you go, half square triangle, half square triangle tutorial, half square triangle quilt tutorial, half square triangle quilt, half square triangles, easy quilt blocks, easy quilt block patterns, beginner quilting, quilting for beginners, quilt block tutorial, quilt block patterns, quilt block series, easy half square triangles, how to make a half square triangle

Id: m75golkDE1o

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2017