5 Ways to Make Perfect Half Square Triangles! How to Choose the Best Method + Worksheet Download!

half square triangles they are like the bread and butter of quilting they can stand alone to make a quilt just up half square triangles they can be used as components in more complex blocks they're they're basically awesome and there are many ways to make them and the styles on making them have changed throughout the years there are some very fast and easy modern methods and there are some older methods that you don't see quite as often in modern quilting but they still have their advantages all of these half core triangle methods are for the most part interchangeable you can certainly just swap out the math cut different sized squares and go from there all of the math that i'm going to go through is based on the finished size of a half square triangle that is once it is sewn into a quilt and all those seam allowances are already taken out i am going to be making four inch half square triangles throughout so all of these methods will result in a four inch finished half square triangle the first method is the snowball method i don't see this used very often but it does have a few advantages this method requires a smaller initial piece of fabric which can be advantageous if you are working with a very tight cutting schematic or you're working from scraps and you only have so much fabric you can also use this method to modify a block that you were already in the process of making because this method doesn't change the eventual size of that unit so if you have a square that you have already cut for a block you can turn it into a half square triangle using this method and it is still that same size now the disadvantages and this first one can be an advantage or a disadvantage and that this method makes one half square triangle which that might be all you're looking for if you just need to make one or you just need to modify one little piece of a block then that's great you don't want to end up with little random half square triangles that might collect around your room the disadvantage is that it only makes one so if you need a lot of half square triangles for a block you're going to have to go through this method multiple times another disadvantage is that this does produce scrap and they're not like nice scraps they're like these weird triangle scraps so let's make a snowball half square triangle so for our snowball half square triangles i have cut two squares of fabric and they are the finished size of my half square triangle which is four inches and then i have added the 0.5 inches for the seam allowance and then also i add which is totally optional about a quarter of an inch to all the half square triangles that i make for trimming room sometimes it's an eighth of an inch but i like to have a quarter of an inch so in total each of these squares is four and three quarters inches to begin you choose one of your squares it does not matter which one and we're going to draw a diagonal line this line obviously will not be seen from the front so you can use whatever marking tool you prefer to use once you have this line drawn put your squares right side together now we are going to sew on the line right on it so here's where the waist comes in we are going to take our sewn together squares and we are going to put the quarter inch line of our ruler on our thread line on our stitching line and then we are going to trim off the excess so you're going to end up with these two weird triangles here's how to save them take your stitching line the line we drew from the diagonal to the diagonal measure over half an inch and draw another line or you can eyeball this and stitch a second line of thread on that second line so now that we've sewn our second seam line which is just going to give us a little bonus half square triangle it's time to cut these apart and you are just going to trim right between them so you're going to end up with a big half square triangle which is the one that you wanted and a small half square triangle which is your little bonus so you don't end up with scraps so now it's time to trim our half square triangle and i have my four and a half inch square ruler here you can use whatever ruler you like to trim but i have one that's exactly the size so i'm gonna use it and this is why i added a little bit of built-in size to my initial squares just so that i would be able to trim them and get them nice and perfect we go a lovely little four inch finished four and a half inch at this point a square triangle the little bonus half square triangle is always going to be half an inch finish size smaller than the one that you were trying to make so we wanted a four inch finished half square triangle we also have a three and a half inch finished half square triangle so that's snowball half square triangles it's a great method if you are trying to modify an already existing piece of fabric the next method is sewing together triangles to create a half square triangle unit this method seems to be maybe a little more traditional i see it mostly in older quilting patterns so the big advantage to this method is the ability to mix and match prints many of the techniques we're going to go over from this point on are going to be making multiple half square triangle units at the same time which is super convenient but all of those half square triangles are going to be identical and so if you want to make a very scrappy quilt where all of the haskell triangle units are different then this method is for you because you're going to be able to shuffle all those fabrics into different pairs so that these two fabrics can be together in this unit and then with different fabrics in other units so the disadvantage of this method is that it's a little bit fussier you're gonna have to sew these bias edges together which it's not hard i know that i have talked a lot about bias in some of my previous videos but it is nothing to be afraid of bias is just another thing to tackle in quilting use your starch take it slow it'll be fine so to make half square triangles using this method you are going to start with a square of fabric that is one inch bigger than the final measurement of your half square triangle and then you are going to cut it on the diagonal in the snowball method we drew a line down the center but in this one you're actually going to cut down the middle once you have your triangles cut then it is just a matter of putting them right sides together and sewing them together with a quarter inch seam if your machine is the type that likes to suck down these little teeny tiny triangles into it then uh starting with a little leader or a little scrap of fabric first will help prevent that and once again i oversized the initial squares by an eighth of an inch this time technically a lot of the resources you'll see will have you add 7 8 of an inch to the finished half square triangle size that you want but i just round up to that nearest one inch so that i have just a tiny little bit of trimming room two more half square triangles done now this method does make one at a time but i had those extra triangles left because i initially cut squares so i just went ahead and made the both it's time for two at a time half square triangles which i think is probably the most common method of half square triangle construction that i see in most modern patterns now it does have a couple of disadvantages while it makes two blocks they are identical so if you want a really scrappy look to your quilt you are going to have the same fabrics joined together twice in your quilt the obvious advantages to this method are that it creates two blocks you don't have to work with any exposed bias edges the other advantage is that there's no waste to this you're not going to end up with that little tiny bonus half square triangle in this method you're going to end up with two full-sized escrow triangles to make two at a time half square triangles you're going to begin with two squares that are one inch bigger than the final half square triangle block that you want since i want four inch finished units i'm going to be in with two five inch squares so to do this you draw a diagonal line from corner to corner on the wrong side of one of your squares you put your squares right sides together and then you are going to sew a quarter of an inch on either side of the line you are not going to stitch on the line as you did with the snowball method another downside to the two at a time half square triangle method is that you can't use the seam guide on your machine so my seam allowances are always a little bit more wobbly when i do the two at a time method now that we have our two stitching lines it is time to cut our triangles apart and you just line up your ruler just as you did before but instead drawing a line you cut on the line now you have two half square triangles let's press and trim now it is time to tackle i'm not going to say it's controversial because it's totally not but i would say the most unusual method and that's four to time half square triangles so the advantages of four to time half square triangles well first of all you get four half square triangles which conveniently is the number that a lot of quilt blocks seem to require this method also might just work better in your cutting schematic if you are trying to squeeze every last bit of fabric you can the disadvantages are bias we are going to end up with half square triangles that have bias edges on all of the sides now these bias edges don't necessarily have to be a problem they could work to your advantage if you have a block that has half square triangles set on point within the block and then other pieces of the same fabric are kind of oriented straight on the block then cutting your half square triangles this way will allow you to have your fabric the print of your fabric be going in a consistent direction in your block which if you're working with a stripe or something that obviously has like an up and down then utilizing this method might be just what you're looking for so the math on this block is a little bit more involved and i think it'll be easier to explain after we make the block we are going to take our squares of fabric and put them right sides together and now we are going to sew all the way around this little unit on all four sides with a quarter inch seam allowance okay i know this looks a little nutty because we have this kind of pillow envelope that we can't even get into we're just looking at the ugly side of our fabric so now lay your little enclosed envelope down and we are going to cut on the diagonal both ways like in a big x i think it's easier to do if you cut one diagonal and then move your ruler and cut the diagonal other diagonal without moving your fabric and now we have four half square triangle units so now let's talk about the bath so now that you see our four half square triangles laid out you can kind of see how they fit into our original square that we needed to cut the traditional kind of top and bottom and side measurements of our square are actually the diagonals of the square that we need to cut so to find the size of the square we need to cut you're going to take the finished half square triangle unit measurement that we're looking for which is four you are going to add a half an inch for the seam allowance four and a half and there's two of them along this diagonal either way so that's nine and then you need to add one inch on top of that for these seam allowances that gives us 10. now if you remember back to middle school geometry you'll remember the pythagorean theorem since we know the diagonal of this square we can find the sides so the pythagorean theorem is a squared plus b squared equals c squared but since it's a square we know a and b the sides are the same so we need to solve for a from 2 a squared equals c squared and c is 10. so let's just do the math c squared is 10 squared so 100 divided by 2 50 and then you take the square root which turns out to be something like 7.07 now i'm not going to cut a 7.07 square i'm going to round up to seven and a quarter to make my life easier and give me that little bit of trimming wiggle room so now that we've climbed that little math mountain i am going to press my half square triangles and trim them down and now we finally come to our last method of half square triangle construction eight at a time this has got to be my favorite method because it's the fastest and i often need a lot of half square triangles when i do need half square triangle like most of our other methods this begins by cutting two squares of your fabric now to size these squares i promise this is gonna be easier than four at a time you need to take your finished half square triangle block measurement which is four for us you need to multiply that by two eight and then you need to add two inches that just kind of gives our seam allowances and our little bit of trimming wiggle room so my blocks are 10 inches there are a few disadvantages to this construction method even though it's my favorite it does require the largest piece of fabric so if your cutting schematic is pretty tight you might not have room to get a 10 inch square out of a fat quarter or another piece of fabric if you are looking to make a lot of half square triangles this method does make eight blocks but they are identical remember back when we were doing the triangle method and i talked about how you could shuffle all your colors so that you ended up with a really big variation of half square triangle units you're gonna end up with eight here but they're gonna be eight identical half square triangles the final disadvantage is if you work in a small space if your sewing area is your dining room table or a small table that you don't have like a large cutting surface on then it can get unwieldy to make eight-a-time half-square triangles once you're working with an initial square that might measure 14 inches across or 18 inches across that's a lot of fabric and you're going to need a really big ruler to deal with that that being said this is a great method even though there are those disadvantages so now that we know what size our squares need to be it is time to make the half square triangles and i have my fabric squares right sides together and i am just taking a ruler and drawing two long diagonal lines on the back of one of my pieces of fabric this is just like we did for the two at a time half square triangles you are going to be sewing a quarter of an inch on either side of each of these lines so a total of four lines of stitching now that we've sewn our lines of stitching it's time to cut them apart now you're going to be cutting on both of these lines and you're going to be cutting top to bottom and side to side so there's four cuts to make and again you want to just gently pick up your ruler and reposition it without moving the fabric underneath just to make it yourself just to make it a little easier these cuts can be a little awkward if you have a rotating cutting mat it can be a little easier now it's time to cut top to bottom there's a couple of reference points you can put one line of your ruler along the bottom of the fabric and then you just want to go right through the center the little peak of these triangles and the same thing i'm going to use a line on my ruler to line it up with the edge of the fabric and then make sure that i'm going right through that center and that's it open this up and we have eight half square triangle units and if you pull one kind of corner apart you can see that this is our two at a time half square triangles we drew the line we sewed on either side and and then we cut on the marked line so if you think about it that way the math to come up with the square size is even easier because it's just double what you would do for two and a half half square triangles so now i have eight top square triangles that need to be pressed and trimmed there are a few other methods to make half square triangles there's triangles on a roll which i've never actually personally tried i know a lot of people really love them but it's basically a foundation paper piecing pattern for half square triangles they come by size so you'll need a different roll of paper for each potential hasker triangle unit you would like to make and that's mainly the reason that i have never tried them i feel like it would be another thing to store in this already stuffed room but that's just my personal preference you may really enjoy using them and come out with great results and that is what really ultimately matters the final half score triangle topic i want to discuss is trimming today i was using this ruler which is the four and a half inch square creative grids ruler and i use this one a lot i make a lot of half square triangles that are around this size so i find it really handy to use that being said i tend to press all of my seam allowances open which makes this a great ruler to use however if you press your seam allowances to the side then you might want to try this this is the block lock ruler and it's also the four and a half inch size what makes this ruler really handy is see this like frosted line it's actually a groove in the back of the ruler and i don't know if you guys can see that but that groove on the back locks into the seam allowance of your block and it makes it really stable so that you're sure to cut your half square triangle so that your seam is on the true diagonal so you're not going to end up cutting it so like the the corner of your unit is kind of off to the side now you don't have to have these in every size like any square ruler as long as it is the same size or bigger than the square that you are needing to trim then it'll work great so i just happen to have the four and a half inch size so i have 17 little half square triangles here and i think i need to sew them together into a little bonus quilt top because i don't have enough tops to quilt right now so guys i finished all of my half square triangles and i assembled them into a quilt and i'll just show it to you it's just really loud these two prints are fairly large scale and their bright colors and put next to each other it's i don't know if there's just not enough contrast or i don't know there's a lot of reasons why this is not a good look so if you are going to follow along on this half square triangle adventure with me then i suggest that you use a print and a blender or a print and a solid or even two solids if you want this quilt to come out to be a little bit less loud but that being said at the end of the day it is still a quilt i'm going to quilt it and finish it i have a few kind of crazy quilting ideas that i might take the opportunity to try out on this quilt but in the end it will be a cuddly warm quilt and my daughter will probably love it so that is what is important i have the half square triangle worksheet with all of the math and formulas that you need to find the sizes of initial squares to end up with the half square triangle sizes of your dreams in the description below and there's also a download for this pattern um also down there in the description there are two videos popping up on the screen right now one is a link to my blog study series and the other video will be a video that youtube thinks that you will love so i hope that you guys have a lovely week and happy quilting and they are wrinkly they're wrinkly let me press these

Channel: Tiny Orchard Quilts

Views: 102,926

Keywords: quilting, quilt how to, quilt, tiny orchard quilts, half square triangles, half square triangle tutorial, half square triangle, easy half square triangles, how to make a half square triangle, half square triangle quilt, half square triangles made easy, half square triangles 8 at a time, half square triangles 4 at a time, half square triangles from 10 inch squares, half square triangles 2 at a time, half square triangles 4 at a time chart, half square triangles 8 at a time chart

Id: vyUGk8Sy10E

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020