Treating myself :)

I treated myself on Friday.   For those of you that know me, no, I did not consume an entire giant white Toblerone, nor did I have a fabric shopping spree.  This treat involved four uninterrupted hours sitting at the sewing machine, sewing something just for me!  It was bliss!  Little Felix was at the childminders (and I am happy to report that she now adores the place and cries when I make her leave) so I decided that rather than doing washing (surprise surprise) or even sewing something to sell, I'd just do something I wanted to do.

I'd seen the Modern Mini quilt competition going on over at Ellison Lane Quilts and had been inspired by all the amazing ideas that had been posted in the blog hop that Jennifer had organised in the run up to this competition.  A few ideas were buzzing around in my head for my entry...and one of them was getting to grips with triangles, and I mean the tricky equilateral ones rather than the (also tricky) half-square ones I work with more often.  Lynne, over at Lilys quilts made a fabulous triangle mini-quilt, and Laura at Needles, Pins and Baking tins worked some magic with equilateral triangles on a large quilt recently too.

So, I started slicing some up, using any nice rainbow-y scraps that I had.  Rather than make a template, I used my 12" x 6" cutting ruler which has a 60 degree angle marked on it.  I used the edge of the ruler to determine my triangle size, so ended up cutting triangles that were 3" tall.

Once I had a few, I started playing with the layout, and liked the triangle shape so much I opted to stick with that and graduated the colours from one point to another, filling in any gaps by slicing into my stash. 

I ironed all the triangles to a large piece of interfacing and planned to piece them by folding each row over and stitching a seam into the interfacing (this technique) but my plan was foiled!  As soon as I seamed a couple of rows, I found that the diagonal rows became misaligned (see below), and therefore it wouldn't be possible to stitch them all in this way.  Don't ask me why, the maths is beyond me!

Not to be beaten, I had a cup of coffee and then sliced the big triangle back into little triangles (now handily interfaced!).  And then started pieced them into strips in the traditional way!

My four hours was over by this point, so the piecing and the quilting has been finished over the weekend.  I opted for a natural linen coloured furnishing weight fabric for the back, and a dark grey binding.  I quilting the triangles in the ditch in a dark grey thread.  This was a "should I, shouldn't I?" moment as the dark grey thread really shows up any inaccuracies in the piecing (and there are some I'm afraid!) but I wanted the triangles to pop, and thought the grey thread did this better than white.  Finished,  each side of my triangle measures about 23", and the height of the quilt is 19.5".

So, want to see it?  Here it is :)

This is my new favourite thing I've sewn!  

I keep popping by the sewing room and stroking it!

I love that looks cool whichever way up it is, so I added a fabric hanging corner on each point so I can rotate it whenever I feel like it, and have hung it next to my sewing machine...hoping that it'll inspire me to treat myself more often!

x