Faeries and Fibres: quilting triangles

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Quilting a series of triangles in a border

There are red bands on my Mom's African banner quilt and I decided to quilt triangles as I did with one of her earlier quilts. I like the look of it because it is organic, in keeping with the theme of the quilt and it adds texture. This is one of her earlier quilts and you can see the triangle quilting in the red bands.

Although I don't like to mark quilts this is one design that does benefit from marking. With my Frixion pen I made marks along the bottom edge of the strip and they were 1 1/2" apart. On the top edge I made the same markings however they were between the marks on the bottom. I connected the marks to create triangles. If I weren't photographing the marks I would have just used my Bohin chalk retractable pencil to make the markings. These markings are guidelines only and not stitching lines. I will just wing it when it comes to quilting. The stitching doesn't have to be perfect or uniform - the eye will just see the texture when it is quilted.

Quilting this design I sometimes get confused about what direction I should be stitching so I next mark a pair of lines in each triangle to denote the sewing angle.

I start at the lower left and work up to the upper right of the first triangle as in the first sketch in the diagram below. I then come down and stitch the next triangle to the bottom right corner. I repeat these steps until I get to the end!

And here is the finished product! I'll take a warm iron to the quilt to remove the marks from the Frixion pen and I'm done with the red borders. I love the texture that is created and if you use a thread to match the fabric your stitches will disappear but the texture will remain!

This is where I'm at with the quilt. Next step is to quilt the top and bottom and add some quilting to the huts. It will be bound with a facing and then it is done, done, done! Well other than Mom's wonderful embellishments!