My difficult love affair with Half-Square triangles

For those of you not in the know, a half square triangle is a square patchwork block made up of two triangles sewn together.    Here's my story..

The glance across a crowded room
By itself a half square triangle is not that impressive, but put a load of them together and be a bit clever about how you arrange them, and you can come up with all sorts of lovely patterns. I've seen them on Flickr, I've seen them on blogger, and I so want to try these myself!

The first date - rose tinted spectacles
I first tackled these in the Supernova quilt (still to be finished) and although I realised that if you are not precise there will be compatibility issues (trouble matching the points of the triangles when you come to sew them together!), the triangles were small and manageable, and the fabrics forgiving. As a result, I was in love.

The difficult second date
OK, so I thought I'd have a practice before the all important THIRD date (see below).  This time, with baby quilt No.2 for the shop.  I stuck with rainbow colours, but opted for a diamond design inspired by one I spotted here at the quilt festival.  I painstakingly trimmed my triangles (ahem!), and stitched what I thought were perfect 1/4 " seams, but to no avail. ....imagine much cursing, pinning, stretching of fabric and unpicking etc. I must have unpicked at least 50% of the seams in order to get everything to match.  Arrrgh!!!!! The second date has gone on too long, stretching over two evenings so far, and I've still got to do the borders, decide on a back, quilt it and bind it....

But heck, I do still love the half-square triangle..which is a good job as I've already committed to a third date...


The important third date
It turns out that the first block for the Brit Bee is made up of half square triangles. I'm half excited and half petrified - wish me luck girls, it's tonight!

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