Quiltmaking with 60-Degree Triangles with Gigi Khalsa

quilters newsletter TV the quilters community is brought to you by handi quilter designed by a quilter for quilters and Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years hi and welcome to quilters newsletter TV the quilters community I'm Mary Kate Carr Petrus and I'm here today with my fellow associate editor on the quilters newsletter staff Gigi Khalsa welcome Gigi Thank You Gigi's here to talk to us today about cutting sixty-degree or equilateral triangles which you use to great effect in this fantastic tree skirt that you designed for our best Christmas quilts 2014 issue it's beautiful thank you we named it metropolitan mm-hmm I kept trying to think of a way to work in like Nick and Nora Charles but you know large part due to the triangles and the way that they're arranged and I guess if you want to make the tree skirt that pattern is available in the issue but today I'd I just want to talk about the triangles in general so 60 degree triangles or equilateral triangles you may remember from geometry all the angles are 60 degrees and all the the sides are the same blanks mm-hm so you can mix and match and turn the patches around and really get cool effects and they'll all fit together perfectly mm-hmm so in this one you can see I've done hexagons I've got little triangles here I mean diamonds got triangles and a big great six pointed star so you can really get a lot of effects just depending on value and color placement right and like you said they're pretty simple once there you'll deal with bias on some of the edges that's true than that they're they doesn't take a lot of skill to work with them successfully I don't think are a lot of experiences you know I've been to them pretty pretty easily as long as you follow a few simple rules you want to start your fabric of course yes but that helps just to keep everything the same size mm-hmm and it's very easy you don't you there are special tools available of course there's the applets and rulers but you can just use a standard ruler cutting mat and a rotary cutter and get these triangles and really have a lot of fun creative yeah great well let's take a look at some of the samples that you brought in some of the techniques that you'll show okay so in order to make those pieced triangles the ones with the stripes on them you want to of course piece your strip and so what I've done is I just sewed my strips from selvage to selvage and the proportions are in the issue of course so the first thing you want to do is make a 60-degree side and what you can do is you'll see on my ruler I've got a mark that goes 60 degrees both ways and so I'm just gonna use that and line it up with the edge of my fabric I just want to make sure that it's right on there right and then you make your first cut line that up and this is probably what takes the most times of this whole process is just making sure that everything's perfect and so there you go and that's your first cut then I'm gonna flip this around so I can work with it and the way to get your next patch is line up that same 60 degree mark with the cut you just made and that's why that precision matters because if you're exactly by a thread or two it's gonna start adding up it will add up the further you get done the strip and then your your patches won't match and you might be mad at me and that won't be good oh another thing you want to do is make sure that you're right on the points yes right on the angle where the the two sides meet and I'm just gonna go ahead and make that cut and then to continue I'm gonna line this up with the bottom now for the top I guess whichever you prefer but what that's the line going in the opposite direction yes this you'll see the 60-degree mark right there lined up with the strip and I want to make sure that it's right at the edge there so I'm gonna just scoot that over make sure that all my marks line up and then I'm gonna go ahead and make that cut and you'll see how I get very different patches from the same strip yeah and so you can have a lot of fun with this just because the proportions are so different you can really mix they're basically two different patches even though from the same strips so for the sake of clarity let's call this unit 1 and unit 2 just so we can tell them apart mm-hmm and in the tree skirt you use I believe 36 unit ones and 24 unit twos so you'll have some leftover if when you're cutting them like this to get the exact these are gonna have some leftovers of you will have a couple left over so that's a really fun opportunity to play around and make something cool and that's exactly what I did course you did yep so I made a fun little pillow out of my leftover patches and this really goes to show how you can arrange the same patches to get totally different things so I've got sort of a weird geometric thing over here and then I've got sort of a reverse star on the side and so I have a couple pieces tech tips and I'll just go over those so here's my patches for example you could arrange them to make sort of gradated hexagons here or whatever you want you could introduce solids or other prints and really good cool design effects but let's say we're gonna make that pillow so I'm just going to figure out what I did okay okay we just gotta scoot all these so and then all of a sudden you have this design yes which is totally different and what I like to do is to join these in rows so I start by joining the pairs together and then I'll join these to the to the end now what you might be tempted to join them in pairs like this hmm but the trouble with that is once you want to join all of them together you have an inset seam which is you can do but why it's not terrible but if you can avoid it you might as well so I prefer to do horizontal rows mm-hmm so when I've got these two joined there we go you go and these two no that's totally wrong yeah there we go and you'll see how it can be really confusing to figure out which one is which just playing just yeah but when when you go to join your patches it's a good idea to pin which seem you're going to be sewing yes otherwise yeah you get to the sewing machine and you're like wait which side yes so I always pin the one that's ever happened yeah I just heard that in some way I've never expected myself yeah so another fun thing about using the strips versus templates is that you can use these little dog ears to line up your next patch ha ha and that and then you can use this little knot to be your quarter inch seam allowance that one right there and I definitely recommend using a design wall and normally when you are doing this at home you don't have a camera on you so that's true just join them in rows go slowly stitch slowly if you want your points to match you're gonna have to pin mm-hmm as you sew and just do it very carefully you may have to take some seams out if you get the wrong side attached to the wrong thing as you can see it's very easy to do yes chain piecing is maybe not always the best for this because you want to keep things it's true if I had a long strip I tend to join them in pairs press all the pairs and then I joined the pairs into a long strip so that's that's my tips for sewing them together it just go slow be very careful know what you're doing and you still had some triangles left over I did have some triangles left over it so and I figured you know I've got enough I got a tree skirt I have a little pillow but what if I want to go out so I made a little clutch that's fantastic thanks and I just got this chain from my local craft store and made a little fancy clutch to take to all my holiday parties really it's so that's it's perfect for the holidays it is so flexible and it's great this time of year I'm having a intense love affair with this with this fabric line yeah I can't get enough of it it's great tacular it's really spectacular fantastic well what else do you have so say you want to do that triangles of a different size yes yes so you want to figure out what size strip you need in order to get triangles of say four inches mm-hmm so there's probably a way to do it on the computer but I'm very analog yes I just do stuff by hand so well with this technique the only specialty equipment you need is graph paper that's right it's in addition to your pencil and your ruler yes so what what I do start very simply and I just drew a four inch line on my graph paper and it's hard to see through the the paper or the with this cutting mat behind it but this is basically 4-inch and it matches up with the marks on the graph paper mm-hmm and I drew a light line right through the center of that and then I did a quarter inch line which is your seam allowance so the next step is to just line up your four inch mark with that line right there and then bring the tip of the ruler right to that Center in there and then just mark that this is this is a place where having a really sharp pencil point will again make a difference it will because if it's thick or if you're off the line a little bit it's again it's just those little incremental measures you make in the pound yes so I always use a mechanical pencil on graph paper I just find it a lot easier so you want to do the same thing on the other side just go straight from that center line right to the mark that you made and there is your equilateral triangle and that's not enough because we're going to be cutting and sewing these yes so you'll just want to add your seam allowance I love these little thin graph rulers to add your quarter inch seam allowance and there you go and now you could conceivably just go ahead and mark the tip of that but you want to make sure that you're you're accurate so once you've got your triangle drawn you want to make sure that it will continue correctly so I'm just going to make another quarter inch line and this will be the beginning of my next triangle so I'm gonna just mark the top of that and then mark a quarter inch down this way and then all of a sudden you've almost got a full triangle right and the best way to finish up is just to make sure see I've got four inches mmm over there and mark that and put on your seam allowance and you're done and I went ahead and measured it and my strip is gonna be four and a quarter inches I don't have to do any math you just have to do the dress measure it and if you want to do a really big triangle just get really great big graph paper right the same thing yes and so what I did when I got my four inch for an a quarter inch strip I cut a bunch of striped fabric rather than piecing on my figured why not use printed stripes for the same kind of cool effect and I did a little strip you'll see how my I press all my seams open okay and that's how you get your little dog ears to match up right and I don't know if you remember but last year's best Christmas quotes 2013 I did the eye candy glasses case I remember them and this is basically the perfect size so I just went ahead and cut that into four inches by 15 inches and made a glasses case I believe that pattern is probably still available oddly it was really well your very so inventive and these are great this is great technique to use and it's really said it's it's pretty easy it doesn't take a whole lot of skill or experience to jump into working with 60 degree triangles so take some of these tips just start playing around and see what you can come up with thanks so much for showing this today to you thanks for having me take care we look forward to seeing you next time bye bye quilters newsletter TV the quilters community is brought to you by handi quilter designed by a quilter for quilters and Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years you

Channel: Quilting Daily

Views: 19,510

Rating: 4.8928571 out of 5

Keywords: Tutorial for Quiltmaking with 60-degree triangles, quilting with triangles, triangle quilt projects, tips for making quilts with 60-degree triangles, quilted Christmas tree skirt, Gigi Khalsa, Mary Kate Karr-Petras, QN TV, Quilters Newsletter TV, Quilters Newsletter Community, Quilters Newsletter TV: The Quilters Community

Id: l_dwEkIcT9k

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 22 2014