I’m constantly getting requests for great quilts for men. And so I busted out my sketch
book one day and started drafting up a fun half square triangle quilt and had so much
fun I’ve turned it into what we’re calling the Reflective Stars. Check this thing out.
You ready to get started?
So here’s the before and after and not only that a good invitation down into the description
below to get your printable for today’s workshop. But this is that sketch book that
I was playing within. And like I said having a blast creating this. Now this project behind
me, I was thinking of a full quilt but of course you can see by that cool narrow center
strip this would be a fantastic table runner project as well. The quilt finishes 90 inches
tall by 60 inches wide, 89 by 59 but I like to round up. But just so you can see that
would be a fantastic table runner as well. So for today’s project however what I’m
using is some solid brown and some solid blue Kona cotton because I’m also using the Kona
Artisan batiks from Robert Kaufman. And we’re going to need one of these little five by
five squares. And I need about 154, if I remember correctly off the top of my head, squares
in the background. And I’m going to get four half square triangles for every grouping
that I make.
So the first thing I do need to do is make those groupings. So I’m just going to come
across here really quick and I’m going to group this batik five by five pack into color
families. And I’m using all the same fabrics in my piles. And I’m thinking of browns
and then I’m going to get down into my blues. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going
to pick constantly some high and low or dark and light fabrics to make up my squares. And
I have mixed brown and brown, so dark brown and light brown. I mixed dark blue and light
blue and then I mixed my browns and my blues together as you’ll see here in a second.
I’m almost done. And I had a few left over so I did decide to go ahead and omit the almost
black ones. I needed one square but not all of them. So if you look on the ironing station
over here you can see that I left a few extra out. Ok. So now how did I marry these though.
So what I did is I took a light brown and a let’s say like this, a super dark brown.
Take those two squares, set them together. Come to the next one. Light here, that’s
got a little bit of a green hue to it as well. So I’m going to put those together, ok?
Same with my blues, right? I’ve got a light blue and a dark blue. We’re going to join
those up and stack them, stack them. Put my light sides up. But then also there’s going
to be a time where you can take a brown here and a blue as well. And just going to go through
all of your colors. And it’s very, very random. Kind of get that wonderful stained
glass effect you see happening behind me there. So I build all of my squares up. And when
I have, and let’s use these for real high contrast for today’s video. Let’s set
those over there and tidy up here. We’re going to use the Jenny Doan half square triangle
method so that every two of these five inch squares will yield us four half square triangles,
ok? So we’ve got those.
Now the next thing I’m going to go ahead and do is I’m going to with a quarter inch
seam allowance I’m just going to line these up. I’ve got my seam guide so I’m running
my pinked edges right along that seam edge. And I’m going to sew all the way down and
off the square. I’m going to rotate back into that quarter of an inch format. Putting
a little pressure out here to keep it from puckering. Rotate again. I just love making
my half square triangles this way. It is so easy. And my last seam here. Ok, now as we
come over here to our cutting space, right? The next thing I want to do is I’m going
to have my small, easy to handle ruler and cutter. But first I want to go ahead, and
people have been asking me in some of the comments in my other videos, how do I handle
the bulk when I’m piecing. Well this is one of the ways I handle the bulk when I’m
piecing. Is I, when making these half square triangles this way, I take the time to cut
off all those little corners or technically what they call doggearing the corners here
so that my block will have less bulk in the corners. And then I’m going to lay my ruler
from the cross of the threads to the cross of the threads. So where the threads met like
this. And then I’m going to slice here once. And I’m not going to move anything. I’m
going to peel this ruler up. I”m going to drop it right back down through the thread
cross through the thread cross. And I’m going to slice here like yay. And now we’re
ready because we’re going to have four of these light and dark combo half square triangles
. Now just simply grab your light piece of fabric, am I saying that right? I’m going
to press to the dark side and all of a sudden my brain is playing tricks on me. Grab your
dark piece of fabric. I do it all day long, you’d think I’d remember this stuff, right?
So hanging onto to your dark fabric, drop your light fabric here. And then that way
as I go to crease that, right? See that I’m pushing right to the dark side of the triangle,
ok? So we’re going to do that and do that with all your squares, all of your half square
triangles. Get them all built up. And then what I want you to do is I want you to stack
them like I’ve done here. And as I have them stacked I have all of the dark sides
of the triangles facing the same direction and in the same location.
Because what we’re going to do now together is we’re going to build the background of
this reflecting stars and stripes one row at a time. This is not put together in blocks.
So again in the link in that description below I have for you this wonderful printout that
shows the layout of the quilt. But it also shows you the row by row by row as we’re
going to assemble this, ok? So I’m going to start at the bottom on row number one.
And I’m going to take a half square triangle and I’m going to set it because it’s got
the dark looking this way. And then I don’t want to ever to have the same fabrics touching
so at this moment I’m just going to break that pile apart. And I’m going to grab another
one. And in that one I’m laying it out here. Then I don’t want to use those ones again.
So I’ll come down here to maybe a brown. And this one here is showing me that this
corner goes this way like yay. And after I do the entire layout of the project then I
go back around and I use my eyes and I look through the quilt to make sure that these
fabrics are never the same touching each other. I don’t mind if they’re on opposite sides
of the block but I don’t want them touching because it will form a new shape that we don’t
want to happen. Ok let me grab one last square and follow along here. And that dark angle
goes this way. Now I’ve built the bottom row number one. And it doesn’t matter if
you start and top or bottom, just as long as you can keep managed. But then at this
point what I like to do is I like to take a piece of paper or something and I cover
that up. So I’m only looking now at row number two. So then I”m going to come in
here and grab some more fabrics. In row number two I’ve got a dark one pointing out to
that side. But look it’s the same exact fabric. Just what I was saying I didn’t
want to happen. So I just return that to the pile, dig down a little bit deeper and I find
a piece like that that is me exactly what I’m after. Again and I did that on purpose
for you so I could make the point. Those are ok touching close to each other just not touching
edge to edge because you will, like I said, get a different shape starting to form. And
then I come through here and as I work I also continue to just keep my piles, I keep rebuilding
my piles. And what that does is it organically keeps feeding me new colors as I go through,
ok? So I’m going to build this one here again following my designs. And at the very
end before we sew any of our rows or columns together I want to make sure I look around
the entire quilt. And at that point I’m going to go ahead and balance out what I am
looking at as far as the weight of the colors, the girth of the design goes, ok? And then
I’ve got that little point. And I finished the second row so then I’ll cover up the
second row. We’ll put a red line through or something like that. These are free printables.
You can print more or you can share them with your friends.
But once all of the layout is built and everything is just as I want it, then what I’m going
to do is I’m going to prepare to go to the sewing machine, one group of five half square
triangles at a time. So I’m thinking to myself this is going to be the last one that
I sew. So I’m stacking these up. And you notice I’m keeping them all on the seam
side, right? But then this seam side here is going to go like this together. And this
was my seam side so I can lay this here. And then I had a little mistake early on as you
can see I got it caught in the stitch plate because I wasn’t paying attention. Wasn’t
holding my thread tails really is what happened there. It got pulled in so I cut it out and
I’ve used it now as my mental marker because some half square triangle quilts all the points
are heading one direction. But in this to get the design the points are heading in all
different directions. So I’ve made myself this little cheat sheet. So then I lay these
on here and I leave it at my sewing machine so then as I feed them into my sewing machine
I don’t have to worry about getting my seam sides wrong. So I”m going to nest my seams
together if I can. Not all my points are going to be heading so that that works. And I’m
going to sew across here. And I’m going to cut. And then remember this was my next
piece so I have to rotate it but this is my seam side so I know that goes right like this.
Super easy. And I can feed it right back into the machine, right? And I’m going to sew
it until all of my rows are built. And then I’ve got 31 in my project of these little
five by fives going. And then I’m just going to join all of those rows. It makes life really
easy that way. Easy to manage.
Then to build the rest of quilt, check this out, right? When I use my background there
are no seams in the middle of it. So I had what was 2 ½ yards of the brown and 2 ½
yards of the blue, 90 inches, right? First of all you’re going to need two cuts of
each color, 2 ½ inches wide for your binding. So you can go all the way around with your
bindings. And I didn’t pay any attention to where they landed. I just had fun with
it. These strips right in here however are two inches and you only need one of each color.
Then the blue over there is 14 inches. And this brown here is 28 inches. So I’m kind
of playing with even dividable numbers for you as well to make it a nice quilt. Like
I said it finishes at about 59 by 89. And then one of the other tricks I did for the
machine quilting, I wanted this again to remind me of kind of like a fun quilt from like an
old cabin or something. And a lot of the quilts that I found from the heritage didn’t have
as much quilting as we do now with all of our free motion. So look real careful. It’s
just really simple straight line quilting. I used blue threads on the brown fabric. And
I used brown threads on the blue fabric, right? And then what I did early on and I hope you
can see ok. I found this major row of color that was running through here. And I just
simply laid my ruler on here and then I started to chalk out my pencil and then I continued
down, continued down. And then the distances are basically just the width of the ruler
you can see. And I just started marking after I had gone ahead and set that. And I realize,
you heard me stumble, right? One of the things I forgot to point out is I have started by
doing stitch in the ditch using one of my walking feet. And I did this row from the
bottom to the top. And then this row from top to the bottom. I bounced out and did some
machine stitch in the ditch here and here, here and here. And then I drew in my columns.
So I did, I left that quilting a little bit wide open and the reason you can do that is
so the quilt itself will be more pliable, have a nicer drape and be a nice soft quilt
to lay on. And again I just was inspired creating this quilt, it was something I thought you
might find in a fun cabin somewhere or something like that. And I love the way the colors came
together and I would love to see if some of you actually make it into a table runner as
well as the full size quilt. And while you’re working on that I’m going to come up with
some more fantastic quilts for us guys in the sewing world. We’ll catch you next time
at Man Sewing.
Thanks for being a Man Sewing fan. It’s great to have you out there encouraging me
to create fantastic new content. If you’ve missed any of the videos we’ve got links
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