Video:Quarter Square Triangles

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Transcript:Quarter Square Triangles

Hi, my name is Linda Warren, I'm here at Valley Fabrics in Northampton, MA and I'm talking about making quarter square triangle units. We're starting with half square triangle units, so go to the video for half-square triangle units first, watch that. You'll come away with these, and you'll be ready to do this video.

Start With Half Square Triangles

So you've got your two half square triangle units, you're going to put them together so that right sides together so that the seams… seam allowances line up but the colors are opposite position. So in other words the light fabric is on top of the dark fabric, the dark fabric is on top of the light fabric, and the seam allowance is going the same way corner to corner.

Line Up Units

You're going to line those units up. You're taking your ruler, you're lining it up corner to corner and you're drawing a line. Now this can be a little tricky because you have a dark fabric and a light fabric, and the line might not show up on both, so you have to figure out which writing implement works. It might be a special pencil you got at the quilt store or whatever works for you. This actually did show up on both, well enough that I can see to sew on it.

Sew On Each Side

And you just want to take that to your sewing machine, and I'm just going to sew a quarter of an inch from the line on each side. You might have to go slow. Okay, there's my unit. So you've got the drawn line with a sewing line on either side of it, a quarter inch away. You put your ruler on the drawn line; it doesn't have to be perfect here.

This is your seam allowance, nobody's ever going to see this cut, whether its exactly a quarter inch away from your sewing lines or not, whether its exactly lined up with them or not, nobody sees, just make that cut, cut that in half.

Finish the Triangle Units

You now have two units and they are each going to be quarter square triangle units. We can take those, press them, again, and there are your quarter square triangle units. Just like with your half square triangle units you have dog ears to trim. So you trim those off and you've got your nice little square triangle units.