This past winter I worked on making a series of quilts using Latifah Saafir’s Hurty ruler (which makes half-rectangle triangle blocks sized 12 inches down to 1 inch). My goal was to use materials from my stash, with the exception perhaps of some backings if warranted. I do like plain backings for busy quilts.
Each of these quilts has its own blog post entry. But I thought it might be nice to see them in one place–to see the design progression I made–in the order of making.
In “Arrowheads” I wanted to play with the design that gets created when the left or right angle cuts in the half-triangle meet and form an “arrowhead” triangle shape. See the upper right corner for an “arrowhead” triangle. I organized the blocks to make that fat triangle on a diagonal line from top right to bottom left. In places, these “arrowhead” triangle are more subtle than others.
In “Diamonds” I wanted to play with the long triangle that forms when you combine 4 of these half-rectangle blocks. In places I made diamonds, yes, but I didn’t want a quilt of all diamonds. So away from the center of the quilt, I often just used the half of a full diamond block. I also made some diamonds and long triangles in much lighter fabrics, to vary the rhythm.
In “Dancing Hourglass Diamonds” I used the “hourglass” rectangle triangle block I discovered in this year’s Tara Faughnan’s online Blocks 2 class. Once the rectangle triangle block is made, one cuts block on the diagonal and combines the parts with OTHER cuts. Note that you have to have all left or all right cuts on the Hurty ruler for these diagonal cut pieces to line up.
I made some solid little diamonds to pull the eye around the quilt, but take a moment to gaze at the quilt to see what happens–magical bigger diamonds form to join the dance around this quilt.
I was thinking of a red or green border and found this blue leftover in my stash–from a wideback used in another quilt. The minute I laid it next to the quilt top, the quilt started singing. Out loud. Insistent. Who knew?
In “Gradations” I played with the range of sizes available in the Hurty Ruler. I chose sizes that would add up to creating a downward row of 48 inches–in order to make a center with the darker color in this block oriented to the bottom on its side. This center sat on the design wall for several months until I ordered the fabric used in the border triangles and on the back.
A nunber of people have asked me for the name of this fabric: It’s “Pixie Petals in Sapphire,” made by Coming up Roses for Moda (fabric 39788/13).
There may be one more in this series one of these days as I just realized that by mainpulating color, you can make a straight line with this block.
Hmmm…
Louisa Enright's Blog 
So many different ways to use the same triangle. These are all gorgeous quilts, and so different. Thank you for collecting them all together in this post so that we could see the progression. I think I’m going to play, too, one of these days.
I really like all of quilts in this series. Triangles are my favorite shape and the half rectangles is so interesting, I played with that shape in 3 quilts a few years ago and I see a couple ideas here that would be fun to explore.