Little Red House By The Sea

If you have never string pieced before, get ready for some relaxing sewing! I started with a tub of red scraps along with the bits of fabric left from the half square triangles.  Bonnie Hunter gives some size suggestions for the paper foundations in the pattern.  I made mine slightly smaller because I didn't want to waste fabric! My guideline for string foundations has always been 1/8" bigger than the size you need to trim. If this is your first string piecing,  use Bonnie's guidelines.  Mine are 2 different sizes. Yours will all be the same size if you follow Bonnie's guidelines.  For the rectangles,  which are subcut from the larger pieces after the sewing,  you have to be careful that half tilt left and half tilt right. If you follow my paper cutting guidelines rather than Bonnie's,  your starting paper foundation is not actually a square. In order to insure that you get the tilting correc...

It seems like I have been trimming and pressing half square triangles forever! It's good to finally have them completed! I thought I had them all pressed and I found another stack...thankfully already trimmed! Edit** I'm sewing my borders together now and realize it would have been easier if I pressed the red and white HSTs to the red and the cream and red HSTs to the cream. Next time!! I generally store pieces in containers or bags until I need them so that nothing gets lost.  Here I'm using those great zipper bags that new sheets often come in. Off to the side you can see another project that is nearing completion.  It's for Easter so I had better stop the Canada Day Quilt for a while and make binding! After my Easter project is bound it will be on to string piecing using my reds. I am going to use up all my scraps first, and then cut some strips from yardage and fat quarters. I cut most of my strips between 1.25" a...

I'm not going to post the numbers or the sizes,  because that information is included in the pattern. Bonnie uses her Essential Triangle Tool to make half square triangles.  If you have it, use it! There will be no wastage and no trimming! I have this tool, but a friend has borrowed it, so I'm going to use the 8 at a time method, starting with 6 inch squares. I had a blog post last spring showing how to use that method.  Go to the link below.  http://www.littleredhousebythesea.com/2020/04/8-at-time-2-half-square-triangles.html When I did that tutorial I was enamored of my Bloc Loc for trimming half square triangles.  While I still love it, I think I might like my Clearly Perfect Slotted Trimmer better!  Here are some photos of my sewing and trimming and pressing.  It's still in progress! See you again tomorrow for more half square triangles! Happy Sewing!

Hi everyone! It’s been a while. During the first few months of the pandemic I kept myself busy sewing masks and quilts. Then life went back to semi-normal and I actually worked until the end of January. Now we are back to lockdown life, and I am back to quilting. One of the quilts on my list is a Canada Day Quilt. in the fall I purchased a great pattern from Bonnie Hunter from Quiltville.com called Appalachian Autumn because I thought it would be perfect in red and white. I'm going to replace all the fall colours with reds, use whites for the light backgrounds,  and beiges for the gray backgrounds. Who else is in? Gather up your red, white and beige fabric, go to quiltville.com  and buy the pdf pattern, and get ready to sew! Right now until the end of February 2021 the pattern  is 25% off using the coupon code DIGITAL25 at the checkout.  See you tomorrow!