Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Triangle Wrangling

So now your quilt center is all assembled because I inspired you and you hopped right to it. Right?

You're ready to attach the triangle border. The quilt top weighs about 3lbs. The corners have set in seams with 27 triangles between each two corners.
And you have to line up each triangle with the sashing between the blocks.
Scared yet?

You could make a border "frame" and then attach it to the quilt center.
I tried to imagine maneuvering that under the sewing machine and knew I'd have to come up with something easier.

Here's what I did.

First, you have to cut 56 setting tri's. You can cut them in batches. That's my plan. My attention span is just too short to cut 56 triangles in one sitting. Mark the seams just like you did with the blocks.

Pick one corner kite, two blocks on either side, and six setting tri's and assemble them into a corner unit as below. The markings on the triangles (see my previous post) will help you with accurate assembly.

Repeat this for all four corners.

Next, mark seam positions on the quilt top. If you're using a disappearing marker like me, just mark the corner and two blocks out each way because marking more will just disappear overnight. (Yes, the one marking is in the wrong spot. I fixed it after I took the photo.)

Now attach those little corner sections to the quilt top, sewing the seam only about two inches into the second triangle. Once again, all those little marks will make lining everything up a breeze.

Make sense?

Today I hope to finish the triangle border.  Stay tuned.

(If you're interested, I have a couple of disappearing markers over here.  Just email me and I'll give you the details.)

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for the input! It’s so beautiful to see those triangles make the quilt a real That Quilt!

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  2. That's a cool approach. I never would have thought of trying it that way! I'm still deciding what I want to do. Right now I'm leaning toward doing the frame method you mentioned (since I'm hand piecing, I'm thinking it might be more manageable than it would be by machine). But first I need to put the borders on!

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  3. This is really clever. I don;t think I would have thought of this.

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  4. I'm watching and taking notes. Some day...
    Congrats on getting this far!

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  5. Holy cow, this is amazing...............what a job!!!

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  6. I am sure glad that I bumped into your blog. You were exactly in the same place with your DJ as I was. And then I started fiddling around with the corner blocks and just didn't think they were going to be easy to put on at all. So glad I found your chunky method. I had to take my borders apart a little to do your method but it works really good. I only have 2 corners on but they both look really good..thanks again for the suggestion.

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  7. Beauatiful! I wish I had the courage to try to be a "JANE"!!

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