More Tools for Block Piecing

Moving off of rectangles and squares onto triangles was a bit of relief in the daily blocks from City Sampler for #100Days100Blocks.

There are a zillion ways to do half-square triangles of course. But I'm sticking with the methods detailed in the book as the cutting instructions are for those size pieces of fabric. This version involves marking on the wrong side and then sewing right on that line. 

I had to dig around in my pen/pencil drawer to find my white  chalk marking pencil for the dark fabrics, hadn't used that in a quite a while. The new mechanical pencil I'm using quite happily is a Sakura SumoGrip. I find it fits my hand very well, the slightly squishy and larger than normal grip area is easy to hold securely.

 I'm using my trusty Add-A-Quarter ruler to cut the triangles apart because I feel much more secure cutting with it. I don't want to cut up the sewn-together triangles I'm counting on to use for my block. It snugs up securely against the height of the line of stitching and is much less likely to slip. Sure it's mostly intended for foundation paper-piecing, but it works for me in this case too.

 Of course I'm ending up with many extra half-square triangles left-over from this method, but I'm sewing them together (like I did with the Hearts quilt) and hopefully they'll end up in the finished quilt somehow.

 For now they're living in the project box with the left-over strips and pieces from this project. Before I begin piecing each block I check to see if there are any pre-cut sizes/shapes that I can use in that block.