Quick Quilt Top – Half Square Triangle Block: Help us pick a quilting design

This is the second article in our 2024 Quick Quilt Top series. As part of this series, we’ll create a quilt together – from picking a pattern and a quilting design. You can find the first article in this series here and read previous installments at this link.

In Part 1 of our series, I showed you several different layouts utilizing the Half Square Triangle Block and you voted for your favorite. With an overwhelming response, Design 1 – Overlapping Squares won the first part of this series for design layout. If you want a reminder of all the layouts, click here.

Remember when we started this series, we began with one block and ten different quilt top design options.

Which design is your favorite?

In this article, we are focusing on the quilting. I created seven designs from us to choose from.

Since this (to me) is more of a traditional quilt top, utilizing solid fabrics will give it a bit of a modern look. I found Overlapping Squares to be a bit challenging to design and I just couldn’t resist including feathers along with a few design options for modern quilting. Also, because this is not a large quilt and finishes 47” square, it needed some custom quilting as it may become a wall hanging.

Time to vote on your favorite quilting design!

1. Feather Diamond Crosshatch

2. Feather Leaf

3. Feather Star

4. Feather Square

5. Feather Lines

6. Feather Pumpkin Seed

7. Star Lines

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Quilt with us

I couldn’t stop drawing designs and have SO many more that may have gone too far in my design ideas. Some of the above designs are more traditional and some have more of a modern design. Now, I’m seeing that all but one have feathers. Who doesn’t love a beautiful quilting feather?

When I create custom quilting designs, I use my iPad and an app called Procreate. It’s a wonderful tool that I spend way too much time using, but that’s my relaxation time, drawing quilting designs and then quilting them! I tell all of my students, “if you can draw it, you can quilt it”. Muscle memory begins with drawing, no matter what tool you use to create your designs, just keep practicing.

Time to get busy assembling the quilt top

While creating this quilt top, as most of you may have expected, I had a few issues lining up everything, but I was successful in the end. I am glad I chose to oversize the blocks and heavily starch the fabric before I began cutting my fabric.

I wanted to share some tips that I learned while putting this quilt top together. Again, you can find many wonderful instructions online for creating a Half-Square Triangle Block and I chose to figure it out on my own. Below are a few lessons that I learned along the way, I hope they help you out as you make this quilt top!

1. After you have assembled your blocks, trim off those dog ears before you begin pinning and sewing.

2. Pin your pieces so your seams line up. I carefully pinned a ¼” from the edge. I also chose to finger-press my seams after piecing and when I did press my seams open with my iron I did not use steam!

3. Begin sewing the pieces together. You may need to stretch the fabric a bit between seams so everything lines up as intended and so you don’t have any fabric pucker areas.

4. Yes, I had to grab my trusty friend “Jack” (my seam ripper) to remove some stitches and tidy things up!

5. I’m not too disappointed in my seams lining up. Once I get this top quilted, you won’t be able to see all of my imperfections!

Good luck with this quilt top, make it your own and by all means, have fun!