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the Half Rectangle Triangle

Have you sewn a half rectangle triangle block?  It's the stretched out cousin to the half square triangle.  I don't know if I've sewn one before, but if I did it was definitely not an independent design. I love the shape and am looking forward to getting cozy with its construction.

Half Square Rectangles

Today I sat down with this sketch to begin work on my new quilt, the one I mentioned on Friday was all "angles and drama." I'll be using those Loominous II fabrics!  Before I could start cutting I needed to get a general idea of my construction approach.  Luckily, my first internet search led to Heidi's post at Buttons & Butterflies which summarizes different construction approaches to the half rectangle triangle block.

Half Square Rectangles

Generally, I agreed with Heidi on construction approach.  You can find another tutorial of the approach she and I are using right here.  Unfortunately this approach calls for marking 4 points and drawing 2 lines per rectangle set.  That's too much prep for my taste.  On my first test rectangle set, I only marked 2 points and drew 1 line, all on the top fabric (the gray plaid above), leaving the bottom fabric (mint green) alone.  For orienting the blocks I aimed to set things up so that I would be able to start and end my stitch lines where the raw edges of the fabrics meet, which is a concept that will be quite familiar to my Angled students.  It always helps with sewing points!

sewing fine wovens like Loominous

Before sewing, I fitted my machine with a brand new size 10 needle.  Some of these wovens are fine (like shot cottons), so a smallish needle seems wise.  I also set my stitch length to 1.5; whereas, I normally sew at 2.

Half Square Rectangles

Here's my first pair of half rectangle triangle blocks. The construction method worked, but they ended up quite a bit smaller than I expected based on the tutorial's guidelines.  Also, I decided I need to slant all my angles for this quilt in the opposite direction so that I can create the same effect as my sketch.  You'll see, if you compare these blocks and my sketch, that these are reversed in the orientation of the slant.  I feel the opposite slant has more of a sharp, contrary feel, almost a backward-pointing feel, which is what I'm going for in a quilt meant to capture the fact that some things are "Never Easy."

Half Square Rectangles

Now I'm going to be fiddling with cut sizes until I land on the right size rectangles to yield the desired finished block sizes.  Wonder how I even start with that?  After I've sketched a quilt on graph paper, I begin to bring it to life by deciding on the scale for the drawing.  In this case, in order to yield a throw quilt from this sketch, I've decided that each graph square is equal to 3.5".  Based on that scale, my quilt will finish 63" x 77".  Next I look at each block to see what size it was drawn.  Today I'm working on row 3, which has blocks that should finish 5.25" x 10.5".  (I've purposely drawn a 1:2 ratio in height vs. width for the dimensions of my half rectangle triangle blocks.)  My second batch of test blocks demonstrated that cutting rectangles 6.5" x 11.5" will yield blocks that trim nicely to 5.75" x 11", which of course will finish at 5.25" x 10.5", as desired.

Yes, that's quilt math!  I don't mind it at all, if I know where to start.  And, if I don't know where to start, the internet is always there to help.  I'll keep you posted on how things progress!