Triangle Quilt - Part 3 finished quilt top

Note this post the third in a series on my triangle quilt project. Click to view Part 1 or Part 2.

I have finished the quilt top of the triangle quilt! I have never done triangles prior to this quilt, so this was truly a learning experience. I must say by the time I was halfway through piecing the rows, my triangle assembly was notably better with few errors. Sadly, this meant my errors in the early rows were now very obvious to me, and I ended up separating and redoing a lot of my early piecing.

I am just so happy to finally have the top pieced! It is now waiting to be assembled, but all my safety pins are currently tied up in other projects. This is probably a good thing since I have two quilts half quilted at home, and I really need to finish those before I start a third. They are just taking a little longer than I thought since I am trying to do free motion quilting on them. Keep a look out for a post on those in future!

I think when this is assembled, I will go with a nice simple straight line quilting method. This is the largest quilt top I have made to date, and I do not think my little sewing machine could do anything besides a straight stitch on a quilt this size.

I have some beautiful Tula Pink Free Fall wide backing in Lipstick for the backing of this quilt. A Tula Pink triangle quilt definitely needs Tula Pink backing!


Some production pictures are below. I hope you enjoy!

Triangles ready to be pressed

Pressing! I usually press to one side, but you could also press your seams open

Piecing at my machine

Checking my row layout

USA map quilt

My local quilt shop, In the Making, offered a quilt class making their version of a USA quilt (aka the United Scraps of America quilt). I have always loved maps, so what better thing to do than combine fabrics and maps!

In the Making's pattern cover and my outtake states

All I needed for the first day was 50 scraps of fabric, double sided fusible interfacing, and the pattern. I believe that In the Making will be publishing the pattern soon, and I will add a link for that if/when it happens. Click here for pattern!

Day 1:

The first day was spent tracing all the state shapes onto the interfacing and then fusing each state to a different fabric scrap. We then had to carefully cut out each state.

Day 1 progress

We will complete the quilt top in a second class. As you can see I started out West and I am working my way East. I may replace some states that aren't showing up too well (I'm looking at you Washington!)


Day 2:

In the second class, we finished making all the states. We then arranged them on the base fabric. My base is a light blue Moda grunge fabric. It matched the demo quilt and I really liked how it would represent the oceans but still had some texture to the fabric.

This was also the time we remade any states we didn't like. I redid three of mine and an additional one due to an error in the pattern.

The rough layout before anything was stuck down

Once the states were arranged to our liking, we removed the backing of the interfacing and stuck them down. We then carefully moved the quilt to the iron to seal the whole thing down.

All ironed down!

Being from Georgia, I wanted to highlight this state. I also wanted Alabama to stand out. Since red and black are UGA colors this seemed perfect.

My quilt top is now all finished and awaits the finishing quilting. I have picked the same fabric for the binding as I used for Georgia (I am not sure of the name but it comes from Moda's Gardenvale collection). The backing is going to be Tula Pink's Lotus in tomato from her Eden line (I also used this fabric for Kansas).

If you've made a map quilt, I'd love to see it. Leave me a link to your quilt in the comments :)




Edit: The finished quilt can be viewed here!

Triangle Quilt - Part 2 Layout

On Friday I spent hours arranging my triangles out. It took a long time to get all triangles down and I loved being able to finally see the look of the quilt.

My helper cat

There was a lot of rearranging of triangles to get the final result. My sister and husband were a great help ensuring everything looked good!

The full quilt, not pieced yet

I've put the quilt up for the night to keep the furry ones off of it. Now it's all ready to be pieced together!

All stacked up by rows for the night

I have started piecing the whole quilt together, but I expect this will take a while since one row took me about an hour. I also have a quilt class this week, so that will take up my time. Keep checking back for a post about what's next!

Triangle Quilt - Part 1 Cutting

Since my last quilts, I have wanted to branch out a little and do something more than just a charm pack quilt. I also really didn't want to do another log cabin, so I went in search of ideas!

I started by first looking at the fabric I have on hand. I have a tendency to gravitate to the same types of fabrics (heavy prints) in similar colors (mainly purple). When trying to make a quilt out of this though, the fabrics tend to all be too busy and do not blend well. When I wander through the quilt shop, I will end up picking fabrics like this every time. Thus I struggle a little with matching colors from different lines. I'm sure this will get better with time and practice but for now, the easiest way to combat this is to just pick a fabric line and use what the fabric designer has already match together!

My quilt shop recently received Tula Pink's Eden line. I especially love the lotus print of this line and knew I wanted to do something with it. Since I'm new to quilting, I simply did a google search to see what others had created using Eden. When I saw Jaybird Quilts' Stereo Quilt in Eden I was sold! Not wanting to make things too complicated for myself, I decided to not make the Stereo Quilt, but rather just do a simple triangle quilt. The triangle rulers sold seem easy enough to use and  I love how six triangles together can look like a hexagon.

Thus, I set about making my own triangle pattern with Tula Pink's Eden line in mind (a pink, purple, and green colorway). Since, all my prior quilts have been relatively small, I wanted to do a larger quilt. Since my husband is quite tall, I wanted to keep his height in mind and knew I needed to go a little larger than would be necessary for just myself.

My plan, using 5 inch tall triangles 

While I am working towards this pattern right now, I recognize that my mind may change when I finally lay out all the triangles. Based on the pattern though, I will need the following:

• 128 pink tone triangles 
• 128 purple tone triangles
• 124 green tone triangles
• 56 other tone triangles (I'm planning on blue/yellow)

Hence I set about cutting all these triangles. I used all of Tula Pink's Eden line along with fabrics from her new True Colors line and her out of print lines of Elizabeth, Fox Field, and Acacia. I was able to cut 11 triangles per 5.5 inch row of fabric. 

Cutting the fabric to size. Fabric shown is Acacia Butterfly Wings in Blueberry.

Cutting the triangles to size

I currently have 132 pink, purple, and green triangles cut and 44 blue/yellow ones. I am waiting to cut anything else until I can lay out the whole quilt and see what colors I want to add.

Cut triangles sorted by colorway

Check back next week when I lay out the whole quilt!