Half-square Triangle mini quilt

In my quest for mini quilts, half-square triangle paper called to me. I really like the variety of layouts half-square triangles (HSTs) can make and the HST papers let you make eight HSTs with one paper.

The papers have both sewing guidelines and, after they’re sewn, cutting lines. I bought papers for making 1 1/2 inch HSTs and 1 inch HSTs. That’s finished size. I started with the 1 1/2 inch papers and sewed 17 different fabrics into 136 HSTs. I only needed 80 HSTs to make the quilt but I wanted to have a good variety to choose from. I bought a half yard of Moda Grunge fabric in the blue and raided my stash for the rest.

All these needed was to have the “ears” clipped off. The HST papers are labor intensive (sew, cut, tear off papers, cut off “ears”, iron open), but you end up with nearly perfectly size HSTs. This is important if you want your seams to match up well. This is what I made with mine:

I’m in love with this little mini quilt! It measures 10″x15″ and it has everything I love in quilts: it’s bright and it’s colorful! I made this a month or so ago and looking at it now, I’m tempted to make another only in another configuration of squares. The number of patterns is almost endless. It just depends on how you place your HSTs.

Since I had purchased 1″ HST papers, naturally I needed to try my hand at such a small quilt. The smaller the quilt, the more fiddly it is. The finished size would be 8″x10″. Tiny!

It’s not perfect, but I love it anyway. Once thing I learned with this mini quilt is that any mistakes you make that would disappear on a big bed quilt, are magnified on a tiny quilt. If you look, you can see were my seams don’t meet up properly. I don’t much care since this is just for me. Well, I DO but not so much that I’m stressed about it. Naturally, I would prefer to have a perfect little quilt but it’s not so… whatever. It’s fine. I will say that my points are perfect so that appeases me.

Both of these quilts will eventually be hung up in my craft room. I need to get to a hardware store for a narrow little dowel that I can cut down and sew to the back. I’ll sew a hanging loop in the middle on the back and the dowel, ranging from left to right across the top, will keep the corners from curling in. I suppose a bamboo skewer will do the same thing but I don’t have any of those so the hardware store it is.

Here’s a shot of my little sun quilts hung in the craft room:

Happy crafting!