Quick Quilt Tops – Half Square Triangle Block: Help us pick a pattern

This is the first article in our spring 2024 Quick Quilt Tops series. As part of this series, we’ll create a quilt together – including choosing a pattern and a quilting design.

As a quilter, you have endless ways to express your creativity. One fun, easy way to do this is to pick a block and lay it out in different ways – it’s amazing all the different looks you can get! This is my take on a half-square triangle block using a strip piecing technique for half of the block. There are so many variations when making half-square triangles, why not throw some strip piecing into the block?

I love this block because it can be placed to look like a traditional quilt or a modern quilt, both using the same color choices of grays and and off-white solid fabric. I chose to make these quilts more modern as I am a quilter and I get inspired when using solid colors … and I’m more of a custom longarm quilter than a quilt top maker/designer. I enjoy making quilt tops with blank space so I can create more designs when I put these tops on my longarm!

I chose to use a 12” finished block and oversized each before the final cut.

The hardest part of making this block is ensuring your strips are measured accurately. You can use whatever measurements you’d like, just be consistent so they line up when you are putting your blocks together. Also, I used a lot of starch, so my fabric behaved better after cutting!

With this particular quilt top style, I am able to use my excess fabric for another quilt top … bonus! I created 10 different quilt pattern layouts using my iPad and an app called Procreate. I personally use Procreate for all of my longarm quilting designs and using this app made the quilt top designs pretty simple to create.

Which pattern is your favorite?

Help us pick the pattern that we will use for the quilt by voting for your favorite below. Once the votes are counted, I will put the most popular quilt top together and create some quilting designs for you to vote on again. Finally, I will quilt the top with the winning quilting design.

There are probably existing design names for each of the following, I named each of these as I saw them.

1. Overlapping Squares

2. Which Way

3. Square Points

4. Fish School (doesn’t this quilt top color way resemble fish swimming?)

5. Peak Point

6. One Direction

7. One Direction Sashing

8. Jagged

9. Square Room

10. Texas Geese (in Texas we see geese flying north and south, they may not be sure which direction to fly during seasonal changes).

Voting is now over. Stay tuned for results.

Quilt with us

Are you interested in making your own Half-Square Triangle Strip Pieced block?

There are many very well-written directions for creating a half-square triangle block. Simply enter the search term “How to make a half square triangle quilt block” into Google and you’ll get lots of results.

The below instructions are based on a 12” finished block. I will typically oversize my quilt blocks a bit and trim them before finishing due to hard lessons learned in the past with triangles and stretchy fabric.

For the strips of fabric, I used 4” strips of dark gray and 5-1/2” strips of medium grey for the center and 4” strips of ivory fabric for the corner strip.

Stitch the dark gray 4” strips to the 5-1/2” medium gray strip.

Stitch the ivory 4” strips to the outside or dark gray strips. I like to mark the center of the strips (medium gray) down the center and then lay my square of light gray fabric in line with my strips as shown below:

I then mark the center of the light gray block and mark ¼” inch from the center (this ¼” mark will be my stitching line for each finished block).

After sewing each of the ¼” marks, I then cut down the center of the light grey square.

After pressing the seams, I will square up each block.

I’m fairly certain there are better instructions for creating a similar block, but this is what worked for me.

This is such a fun and versatile block!

Tips:

• This block does have some wasted fabric based on the techniques and colors that are shown above. Save those scraps for a similar quilt top!
• Starch the fabric generously.
• Line up seams carefully when sewing blocks together. I like to pin before sewing each section together to ensure they line up evenly.
• Because I didn’t use a written pattern, I purchased 2 yards of each fabric color and was able to make 31 blocks of the above color way.