Half and Half Quilt Tutorial

with
Jenny Doan

Half and Half Quilt Tutorial

Quilt Size: 77 " x 77"
Time: 8 Minutes
Jenny demonstrates how to make a darling Half & Half Quilt using 10 inch squares of precut fabric (layer cakes). We used Greenery 10" Squares by Maywood Studio. Learn an easy way to make half square triangles quickly.
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video transcript

Hi everybody, it’s Jenny from the MSQC. And I’ve got a fun project for you today. Let’s take a look at this quilt behind me. Isn’t this great? I love this color combination. It’s a really cute fabric. It even has lily of the valley on the fabric which was my grandma’s favorite flower. So you know I’m going to love that. So to make this quilt what you’re going to need is one packet of ten inch squares. And we have used Greenery for Maywood Studios. And when I’m saying one package I mean 42 squares. You’re also going to need one package of a background solid and we’ve used this nice white right here. So 42 of each of those. You’re going to need ¾ of a yard for this first border. And a yard for this little outer border. We just did a little three inch border on this outer border. And it’s just a, you’re just going to need a yard of fabric for that. For the backing you’re going to need about five yards of fabric. And we’ve used this gingham on the back. Gingham is so popular right now and I just love it. It’s just so cute and you’re going to need about five yards for that. And it makes a quilt that’s 75 by 75 so it’s a pretty good size quilt. Alright let me show you how to do this because this is really fun.

First we’re going to start by making half square triangles. And we’re going to put our two fabrics right sides together and sew around this block like this. Just like we do for our normal half square triangles. And I’ve got this one sewn already and then we’re going to cut it diagonally both directions. So here we go. We’re going to cut it this way. Make sure I got that edge. And then we’re going to cut it this way. So diagonally corner to corner. Now sometimes when you sew these squares together you’ll get a little pucker or something right here. Don’t worry about that because we’re going to cut right through that. Alright so then you have four of these half square triangles . We’re going to take them over to the ironing board and iron them open. Alright now I’ve laid them apart like this so I can set all my seams at once. That’s kind of a handy little tip. And then we’re just going to roll them back like this. And then I’ll just keep doing that. You’re going to do that to all four of these. Alrighty. Now we’ve got four of these. And you’re going to square yours up to 6 ½ . These are just a little bit bigger than 6 ½ and you’re going to square them up to 6 ½ because we want blocks that are all the same. And I have some over here that are already squared up. So I’ve got this one. I’m going to bring it in. And again square this up to 6 ½. You can see right here it comes right on the 6 ½ line. Alright now this is where the magic comes in. This is really fun.

So we’re going to take this half square triangle and we’re going to cut it in half both directions. Now the block measures 6 ½ so we’re going to divide that in half and we’re going to come in 3 ¼ from the edge because that’s half of 6 ½ . And we’re going to cut it this way and then we’re going to turn our ruler and cut it 3 ¼ from the other edge as well. There we go. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to take these two blocks right here and we’re just going to swap them. And look at that cute block. Isn’t that darling? We’re going to sew this together as a four patch. But let me do the next one as well so I can show you how we put the whole block together. So again we just make our four patch. We measure it. We trim it down to 6 ½ . We divide that in half, that’s 3 ¼. We’re going to come in and cut on both sides, like this, oops, and like this. 3 ¼. So basically the reason I’m telling you the math like that is because any size half square triangle, this will work with any size half square triangle. You just have to measure it and divide that measurement in half. Again we’re just going to take our big squares out like this and swap them. Isn’t that so cool?

Alright so now we’re going to sew these together. And I”m going to lay these over like this. And I’m going to take them over to my sewing machine and just sew a quarter of an inch right down the side. You want to make sure that your block is oriented to the right direction. So I’m just going to chain piece these together, line them up, sew a quarter of an inch right down the side. Then I’m going to add my next two in here and just keep sewing down. You’re going to need four of these to make a block. You’re going to want to do this to all four of your half square triangles. Hang on I’ve got these two that are sliding apart here. There we go. Alright now I’m going to cut right in between here but I’m going to leave these two connected because I know they belong together. I’m going to open them up to make sure that they’re going all in the right direction and they are. And so then I’m just going to sew this right down here. Hang on. you’ve got to get these lined up just right. So take a few stitches and I”m going to find my middles and line those up, put my finger on there and sew to the center and right on down. And I’m going to do the same thing to this one. Alright. Line them up, a few stitches, find my center and make sure I’m nested in there really nice with one seam going one direction and one going the other. Alright now let’s go to the ironing board and iron these open. Alright. This is so, this is so fun. I love it when we try something like this and. You know I was just like, what happens if I cut a half square triangle right in half. And I love what happened. Alright so here’s our two blocks. And I have two blocks already done.

Alright so let me show you how to put these together because again they’re just going to go together like a big four patch. So one block we’re going to put together so that all the white squares meet in the middle like this, a big four patch where we put that together. And let’s look up here in the quilt. So you can see every other block has the white together and the color together, and the white together and the color together. So half of your blocks are going to be made this way. And then the other half of them are going to be made this way like this. And that makes one block on our quilt.

So I’ve got some blocks here already done and we’re going to do a colored block. And you’re just going to stagger them. You’re going to put a block that has white in the center next to a block that has color in the center. And you’re going to do that for your whole row. And when you get ready to add your next row down here, you’re going to stagger it so you’re going to show a block where the color comes together and then the next block where the white comes together. So let’s look at the quilt one more time. So here we’ve got, we’ve got color together, white together, color together, white and then we stagger the next row and it makes that secondary design that’s in there. . So we’ve got six across by six down. There’s only 36 blocks we used on this. And the reason we did that was because there’s several in the pack that were just too light. Now if that ever happens to you when you’re using your pack and you have a piece that doesn’t show good contrast, well you can pull a few squares in from your own stash or you can just make a smaller quilt like we did. So I hope you have fun making this. It’s fun to see what happens when we try something new. And we just cut a half square triangle right in half. And we hope you enjoyed this tutorial from the MSQC.

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